


PRISM

by CaptainDude (HandbagMurder)



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Desert Town, Angst, Character Death, Drama, Horror, M/M, No Smut, Religious Themes, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural - Freeform, Violence, happy ending not guaranteed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-17 00:08:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 53,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9295652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandbagMurder/pseuds/CaptainDude
Summary: Craig Tucker is a dysfunctional astronomer and untrained mechanic, living comfortably in an isolated desert town. Despite being small and out-of-the-way, he thinks that the place isn’t actually that bad provided one isn’t bothered by frequent alien sightings or the activities of the bizarre sect based a few miles out of town. With a lunar eclipse approaching, however, the sect is claiming the end of the world is at hand, and when a stranger who calls himself ‘Tweek’ passes through town on his way to way to participate in Armageddon rendezvous, Craig distracts him. Consequences ensue.WRITTEN FOR South Park Big Bang 2016~





	1. PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy. I can’t believe I wrote the whole thing. This was a super opportunity for me to write something that completely pandered to all of my obsessions. I hope you might enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> This story was written for the SPBB2016, and was posted on the spbb website one month before the date of posting here. The story, and the accompanying artwork by artists Xiao and Natteregn, can also be found on the SPBB website at [this link](http://spbigbang.org/22-fanfiction/spbb162-fics/312-handbagmurder16-0)
> 
> The cover image for this work was drawn by Xiao, and can be found [here](http://spbigbang.org/art-galleries/spbb2016gallery?thumb_limitstart=40#!spbb2016_art_by_xiao01_01)

It was a beautiful day.

The winter was finally beginning to relinquish its grip on the little town, the snow melting to shallow puddles in gutters and green grass poking through the cracks in the pavement underfoot. The sky was the deep rich blue of the far north. Under the shade of evergreens, children played in public parks barefoot, chasing butterflies and sweating filmy sunscreen off their faces.

The public library was sensibly sized, given the population of the town. During the snowy seasons, when the sun receded behind the horizon between the hours of ten and four, it was a haven for people seeking warmth and occupation.  Now, in the springtime, it was deserted. The windows shone glassy like unseeing eyes in the sunshine, and the barren car park seemed to long for the company of cars and snow. Only the bikes of the librarians braved the heat, lined up in a humble row against the west wall of the building.

It was past the tail ends of these bikes that a lone figure stalked, his shoulders hunched and his form obscured by an olive drab coat much too hefty for the season approaching. He wore shiny new sunglasses, and unwashed blond hair in a knot atop his head. When he entered the library and hurried straight past the issue desk without pausing, the librarian on duty looked up from her cross-stitch embroidery and watched him go in confusion. Couldn't even the most hurried patron spare a polite smile as he passed her by?

The boy suspected he might be received in such a manner. He was never really the best at the 'small town civilities' thing. Feeling her eyes peering at his back, he made his way past the harlequin romance collection and pretended not to notice her watching. He had already spent at least forty minutes of anxiety that morning, sitting on the end of his bed trying to convince himself that it didn’t matter what a librarian thought of him, and a further twenty minutes rehearsing what he might say if she tried to suggest he leave immediately. He had every right to be in this place, just like anyone else, and it was of little consequence to him if a stranger happened to think he looked like a criminal, cruising the aisles for a safe place to engage in any number of unspecified criminal behaviours. He needed information, it was as simple as that. He needed an explanation, or justification, or anything, really, to alleviate the clotted, aching sensation inside his skull.

He rubbed the heel of his hand against his temple and tried to remember what he had learned in special ed. English. Non-fiction was the factual stuff, right? Kept in the decimal section, not far ahead. He had to try and recall what call number he wanted because no way in hell was he prepared to ask directions. Maybe it would be better to simply start at the start, and walk along the shelves until he found something relevant to his inquiries.

Maybe it would just be easier to just go home.

He scolded himself, and took a sharp turn left toward the back of the library – toward the infrequently visited section that housed the books with triple zeros on the spine. In the dull, artificially illuminated rear of the building, it was tolerable for him to push his sunglasses up onto his head and squint with red rimmed eyes at the titles he was examining.

Perhaps luck was on his side today - it didn’t take him long to find what he wanted.

His hands trembled a little, maybe from exhaustion, or maybe from caffeine withdrawal, as he slid a book out from between its peers and flipped it over to scan the blurb. Deep inside the building, the heat pump rumbled. Sweat glossed his nose and cheeks, sticking the coat on his shoulders and bringing a wave of heated nausea over him. He swallowed, and braced himself against the shelf, trying to stabilise the words which were morphing and rearranging themselves before his eyes.

 _WHY ME?_ , the book was titled in plain caps font. _A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR ABDUCTEES AND MONITORED INDIVIDUALS_

He almost jumped out of his skin when he heard someone cough behind him, and the book slipped from his grip and onto the floor. A small leaf of paper fluttered out from between the pages and came to rest against his shoe, but he didn’t notice - the librarian from the front desk was hovering a few metres back from where he was standing, looking a little as though she wanted to help but wasn't sure how to do so.

_Puis-je vous aider?_

Was she talking to him?

He glanced left, and right, and observed that there was not another living soul around so she must have been talking to him. The sound of children playing in the park outside carried through the windows at the north end of the computing literature section, and the volume seemed to rise to almost overwhelming heights as seconds passed by. Should he say something? Should he run? Should he immediately assure her that he was not a heroin addict, and she need not fear finding his emaciated corpse prone on the bathroom floor at closing time? That was probably what she was most concerned about - he thought he likely looked like he could have belonged in that category.

 _Non, non, je vais bien._  

He scrambled to pick up the book, and the librarian continued to look on him over the rims of her glasses. For a single, hideous moment, he thought she was going to ask him something else, maybe suggest he hurry up and leave so she can go back to monitoring the empty library in peace, but she did not. By the grace of God, or Jesus, or whichever saint it was watching over him from their panopticon in the sky that day, she did not.

She jerked her head in a stiff nod, and turned her back to him. He watched her glide away, and thought that she walked as though she thought herself above pestering a vagrant about his activities. Thoroughly perturbed, he replaced the book (incorrectly) on the shelf and wiped his sweaty hands on the front of his jeans. For the first time, he became aware that he smelled bad. Like he hadn’t showered in a few days, or like he had been cloistered in a small darkened room for an extended period, constructing paper buildings from matchsticks and PVA.

Both of these things were true.

Suddenly, he was ashamed to be out in public.

The boy wrapped his coat tighter around himself and made to leave. Fuck it. He would just have to google his questions, and if that meant putting himself in danger from whatever (or whoever,) it was keeping an eye on him, then so be it.

That was when he noticed the scrap of paper under the toe of his shoe - a hastily cut slip with inkjet printing on one side.

_ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE RAPTURE?_

He bent down again to pick it up, and one of his knees cracked loudly, sending a sharp pain up the inside of his thigh.

 _US NEITHER._   
   
The boy frowned, hooking a loose strand of hair out of his face and tucking it behind his ear. He turned the paper over, curiosity piqued, and began to read the other side.   
Outside, the birds were singing merrily, and on the bars and swings of the public park, children played.

It was a beautiful day.


	2. PART ONE - CHAPTER ONE

Craig Tucker sat on a stool in the Hotel Bar, eating breakfast and perusing the morning edition of the local newspaper. Although the front page headline read that predicted weather patterns for the region may be some cause for concern among property owners, Craig thought no more of the news that morning than he ever did . He owned no land in the area, and so he felt no anxiety about the way in which the sky was a little less blue than usual, and in the distance dark clouds billowed as though they might just choose to draw closer. Unlike the older residents of Barbelo, who remembered the last time storm broke over this the Radiant Basin and washed most of the small town away, Craig was not conditioned to feel fear at the notion of rainfall or even electromagnetic storms. He rustled the front pages of the paper in indifference, and gave the classifieds and the opinion columns at the back a quick glance over instead.

When there wasn’t major weather news to report, papers like Jimmy Valmer’s _Basin Bugle_ were mostly classifieds and opinions. Many of them were related to the price of liquid plant food or rising water taxes, and had the unfortunate quality of being thoroughly uninteresting. He sighed and folded the paper in half, setting it down on the bar and picking up the slightly misshapen fork he had been provided to eat with. From the corner of his eye, Craig could make out the sub-headline, which (on an equally uninteresting note) read: UFO SPOTED OFF HIGHWAY 239 - FRINGE CULT LEADER ANNOUNCES THE APPROACH OF THE END OF DAYS.

This would have been more ominous if that exact same leader hadn’t been making the exact same announcement bi-monthly, since long before Craig even thought of moving here.

Why was it that even the simple act of reading the newspaper was wearing in this town? 

Craig poked at his strip of bacon, his eyes sore from sleep and his head heavy, as it always was first thing in the morning. He had no one to talk to over breakfast – the residents were as friendly as they ever were, but after an exchange of polite greetings they retreated to their own tables, sipping instant coffee and discussing tomato fertilisation techniques amongst themselves. Their chatter blended pleasantly into the sound of the grandfather clock ticking next to the liquor shelf, and the muffled sound of excitable tourists pouring out of their dusty busses and into the car park outside. Soon, the rustic little bar would be cramped and packed with foreign patrons - people he had never met and could have gone his entire life without knowing. The idea of masses of camera toting tourists sweeping in and ejecting him from his comfortable spot made him a little bitter, but it was something that he, like the other permanent residents of the town, just had to live with. It had happened before, and would happen again. It was an integral and unavoidable part of living in the town.

He finished his bacon and tried a forkful of scrambled eggs. Upon chewing them a little, he found them to be crunchy with sand. This was also a local inevitability. If nothing else, the Radiant Basin could definitely boast a certain proliferation of sand. Without a qualm he continued eating, scanning the UFO article given second priority on the front of the _Bugle_ and learning absolutely nothing more from it than he knew already. The upcoming blood moon and a rash of spring alien sightings, the same sightings which had brought forward the surge in summer tourist traffic through the region, had agitated the strange Christian sect a few hundred miles off road to the point of announcing the end of days was due on Tuesday. Craig thought that that seemed like very inconvenient timing. The new episode of That-One-TV-Show-He-Liked came out on Wednesday, and it would be dreadfully disappointing should he die not having seen it. He wondered what general wider opinion on the topic might be, but suspected that right now the number one priority of almost every single person in the town was the well-being of the local glass-house produce, and ensuring that own-wide drainage issues did not result in a mass evacuation being required. In their concern, it was unlikely that most had even read past the first article at all.

"I see the Foundation people are at it again."

Kenny McCormick gave Craig a hell of a fright, slamming half a bottle of barbecue sauce down in front of him in case, in some sick and perverted alternate universe, Craig felt the urge to put the stuff on his eggs.

"Jesus Kenny!"

Kenny was a local boy - a bar tender and host who went out of his way to make friends with even the most unpleasant and wary of travellers. Most of whom would have had to compete for this title against Craig. A short and sturdy character, with freckles and straw blonde hair, Kenny had a confident, laid-back attitude about him that Craig found irritating, yet enviable. He always had something interesting to say about the local institute of apocalypse enthusiasts, and this was subject that Craig also happened to have an interest in. If only because when it came to dealing with The Foundation for the Propagation of Trans-Universal Consciousness, knowledge was the best way to resist their bizarre and evangelical wiles.

Craig grunted, and scraped the last of the sandy egg onto his fork.

"Weirdos will be weirdos."

"They just won’t leave it well enough alone. All the big city newspapers stopped paying attention to their bullshit _years_ ago."

Kenny shook his head and turned away, rattling bottles and glasses on the shelf behind the bar in the process of procuring himself breakfast too. Usually, Kenny’s breakfasts consisted of Pabst Blue Ribbon, watered down with more Pabst Blue Ribbon. Sometimes he ate toast, but not regularly.

Craig shrugged, finally finishing his last morsel of eggs, and watched as the locals sat around eating their breakfast and talking about how many tomatoes they were going to harvest today. Or how likely it was that the clouds on the basin rim might move overhead. It was only just gone seven thirty am, but already the heat was so thick he thought he was going to have to pass the day in his underwear. Or, in a singlet and cut-off jeans, at _least_.

"I gotta head back to State City today, Craig. Butters wants me to pick up some more rice and beans and steaks." Kenny turned back to him, clutching an opened can of cold Pabst and pointedly ignoring the foam dribbling down the side over his hand. "I hope you fixed my brakes real good."

Craig nodded, using his tongue to probe at the slightly grainy texture the eggs had left on his teeth.

"Guess what was wrong with them," he said.

"Sand again?"

Craig nodded. Kenny rolled his eyes.

"I dunno what we would done if you hadn’t came along when you did, Craig. You saved all of our asses.”

Craig gave him a sarcastic smile, because although employment at the local garage and car repair shop was steady and fairly simple, he knew as well as everyone else in this building that he was no mechanic. His father had entertained an interest in auto magazines when he was a child. Craig had entertained an interest in the models who featured in them. Any knowledge he had about cars was incidental.

"I’m an astronomer," he reminded him, and Kenny laughed his quiet, sniggering little laugh.

"Everyone round these parts is an astronomer,” he replied. “All you gotta do it look upwards."

Craig didn’t argue. He had an entire van to dissect and inspect today, and if he didn’t do it no one else in the little town would. He would be better to just pick up his spanner and his greasy rag and make peace with the fact he spent five years on a piece of paper he would never actually use for anything. Especially if he planned on continuing to live here indefinitely.

"You got any thoughts about this weather then, sky expert?"

Kenny stopped laughing and pointed out the dusty window, at the steel coloured heavens over the distant Basin rim. He was good at hiding it, but Craig could tell that even _he_ was becoming a little unnerved by the meteorological reportings. And Kenny was the sort of person very rarely shaken by anything.

Craig shrugged, nudging his empty plate back over the bar.

"Looks like rain," he said mildly.

“Yeah? Then you better get to and start working. If that rain starts coming you bet your ass you don’t want to be stuck underneath half a tractor."

He was probably correct.

 

...  


The stranger came in a rusty Mitsubishi, carrying a backpack filled with instant coffee granules and a thick manila folder. Craig was almost finished with his van when he heard the wheels crunching on the gravel of the gas station yard. Unsurprisingly, the greyish clouds on the horizon had cleared by ten am, so when he wheeled himself out from under the engine he was almost blinded by the vivid yellow glare of the sun.

"... Hello?” Craig raised his hand to shield his eyes, and the blurry silhouette of a strange man emerged from the haze, haloed like an angel in daylight. "What’s the problem?"

The man shrugged, a very un-angelic gesture, and twisted his fingers together nervously.

"Do you know how much further to the Radiant Basin?" he asked, his speech tinny and accented in an unfamiliar way.

Craig blinked sand out of his eyes and sat up properly.

"You’re in the Radiant Basin," He informed him. "If you’re looking for Barbelo, it’s just behind me." 

He gestured to the buildings clustered behind the station, the nearest being the Hotel he had eaten breakfast at earlier that morning.

The oy chewed the inside of his cheek, like someone who had a follow up question he was too hesitant to ask.

In the end the desire to have an answer won out.

"I’m actually looking for the compound."

Against his will, Craig found his eyebrows creeping slowly up his forehead.

"The compound?”

He was tempted to ask why anyone heading out to the compound would willingly _tell_ him about it. Usually, Foundation applicants hurried through Barbelo without so much as a nod to any of the locals, and Craig had drawn the conclusion that FTUC partisans, colloquially known as ‘Disciples’ tended to be secretive types. The boy did not provide any further explanation, however, so in the end Craig had to relent and give an answer. Or at least, he had to try and make one up.

“Well, I think it’s about ninety miles that way."

Craig, like most locals, had never been to the compound. Everyone he had asked in the past didn’t seem to have a clue as to the location either, so he just pointed west side of town and hoped the stranger wouldn’t notice.

The boy saw through the ruse immediately though, shaking his head in distaste.

"I just came from there," he said stiffly. "Besides, I need gas."

Craig studied him for a moment, taking in the details of his clothes and hair and face, and having become interested despite himself he leaned forward a little in his spot on the ground, elbows coming to rest against his dusty knees. 

"Then I’m your guy."

Craig had seen some weird folks come out these ways to see or join the compound – people from all locations and all walks of life. Shit, he had even had _friends_ taken in by promises of life and salvation and communion with God, but honestly he had to say that this boy standing here in old clothes and new Ray-Ban sunglasses was probably the weirdest. Most notably because, by anyone’s standards, he wasn’t actually that weird at all.

He stood with some difficulty – the hot midday sun often left him feeling a lot older and more desiccated than he was – before dusting off the seat of his shorts and leading the stranger back to the pumps by which his rusted silver vehicle was parked. Reaching for the fuel pump, he gestured that the stranger should go into the workshop to make payment while he filled up the tank. The boy in jeans and sunglasses pressed his lips together and frowned at him, and Craig got a strong feeling like this stranger didn’t like him all that much. Maybe he had watched too many movies about the dangers of backwoods locals in the past. Craig, frankly, didn’t think all that much of him either -  his skin looked burned and red from the heat, and his long blond hair made him look like one of the kids Craig hated in school. The pretty ones that all the girls had a thing for. It was obvious that a guy like this wasn’t made for this kind of town.

"Uh, it’s okay man, I can fill it myself."

"Don’t you trust me to do it? What do you think I’m going to do? Stick a bomb in there or something."

The look he received in response made Craig sure that that was _exactly_ what the stranger expected, though he tried very hard to deny it. City Folk weren’t very good at hiding their prejudices regardless of what they thought, and as a former ‘City Folk’ Craig could spot it better than anyone. He scoffed, and hitched the gasoline nozzle off the rack beside him.

"Look. All I do is open this," he slapped open the fuel hatch on the side of the car and rammed the nozzle inside. "And then I do this. Ok?"

The boy narrowed his eyes at him, Craig could sense him doing it even from behind his shades, and his lips thinned even more than Craig would have suspected possible.

"Ok. Pay in there then?"

He pointed to the shop at the back of the lot, with a chest freezer full of ice by the door and a faded _Mothman Prophecies_ poster in the window.

"Sure. Give Scott a poke and he will wake right up."

Scott Malkinson was a friend of the pub owner, one of those types who hung around in the town without ever seeming to hold down an actual job, and Craig always got the impression that he wasn’t really good for much besides running the store on the mechanics yard and selling bottled water and cassette tapes to passers-by. Somehow, though, he kept on surviving, and he had always taken the time to be fairly civil with Craig. As such, Craig didn’t actively dislike him, although he did happen to think he was a bit of a dork.

Despite being safely walked through the process of what Craig was doing, the stranger lingered just long enough to watch him finish filling the tank and pulling the nozzle back out again. Of course, he pretended not to be when Craig glanced up and him and snapped the fuel hatch closed.

"Your payment better go through alright,” he paused, unsure if he should play with this guy a bit or just let him go unscathed. He decided on the former. “Out here we pull out your teeth if it don’t."

 The boy turned an unhealthy grey and stumbled away, hurrying toward the shop as though he thought Craig might chase after him and string him up by his ankles. Smirking, Craig turned his back and gave the vehicle a quick glance up and down. A Sigma. Late eighties probably. The paint was flaking on the door panels, and the squareness of the front end was so hideous it was very nearly laughable. When he cupped his hands against the back passenger window and peered in, he saw a mountain of empty coffee cups on the seats, and a few empty prescription pill bottles on the floor.

There was a faded bumper sticker on the rear of the car that said ‘I want to believe', and this made Craig laugh aloud had wanted to believe in something once too, and just look at the place where he wound up. If anyone cared to ask his opinion of believing, he would probably have to say it wasn’t worth it.

He jumped when he heard someone cough behind him, and spun around so fast that a small dust cloud coloured the cuffs of his jeans orange red.

"You guys don’t take credit," the boy said quietly. "I need to grab some cash, if you don’t mind."

Craig realised he was blocking access to the vehicle's trunk, and immediately moved out of the way. For some reason, he was embarrassed to be caught inspecting the bumper of an unfamiliar car, particularly after the owner had explicitly expressed distrust towards him.

The boy fumbled open the boot as though Craig’s presence was making him jittery, and after rummaging around between large black rubbish sacks of unknown content, he conjured a fistful of five dollar bills. Craig checked the metre, saw he owed him forty seven dollars sixteen cents, and sighed in defeat.

"Give me $45 and we will call it evens," he said, holding out his hand for the cash. Nervously, the boy pushed his sunglasses up on his head, and Craig was taken aback by the bright, pale green of his eyes.

"But it says $47."

"Yeah. And I’m telling you, you can have it for $45."

The stranger stared so hard and for so long that Craig very nearly ended up taking it back. There was something dreadfully unnerving about the way he looked at him, something vacant and at the same time acutely present, as though in a single look he was seeing every detail of Craig’s face and thoughts in an effort to find something to be afraid of. He was failing, and this didn’t seem to sit well on him. His sunburned cheeks went even redder and he looked away, pushing a wad of cash into Craig’s hand and turning to pull down the lid of the trunk. This action flattered the way that his back muscles moved under his shirt. A fool could see that this stranger was bigger and more muscular than Craig was - whatever his fear happened to be, it was irrational, because he sure looked a lot like he could take Craig on any day.

"Thanks," Craig told him, watching him round the side of the car and yank the door open hurriedly. The stranger raised a hand at him in a half-hearted wave, but it was not a friendly wave so much as a wave that said he wanted to get out of there as soon as he possibly could.

When he started the engine, Craig stepped back, and observed the way that dirty smoke choked out of the rear exhaust. He wondered if he should stop him, and let him know that it wasn't really advisable to drive off road in the Basin in a standard two wheel drive car, but then the vehicle was lurching forward and the chance to do so disappeared.

How peculiar.

Craig was glad to see the back of him.

 

…  


The sun started setting at 9pm, so Craig decided he had better just give up on brushing sand out of the clutch of a tractor with a greasy toothbrush and go and see if the pub was still serving dinner. Evenings in the Basin seemed to draw on forever, and as he wiped oil from his nails with a filthy rag he gazed upwards to the horizon where not a hint of the cloud that had passed that morning remained. Although it was light, he could already see the waxing crescent of the moon to the west, and soon he would start to see stars too. From his part of the world, it was almost easy to believe he could see the curvature of the earth beneath him, echoed in the dome of the sky.

He washed his face and hands in the sink at the back of the mechanics shop. The liquid soap he used was mostly water. Every time the bottle got low he refilled it with tap water and every time the pale orange substance got clearer and clearer. It didn’t even smell that much like oranges any more.

He added another dash of water before he left and gave the bottle a decent shake. Bubbles still formed on the surface of the liquid - a comforting sign.

He decided he would leave it a few weeks more.

The walk back to the hotel was short, and as he went he saw that from all across the town, other people had had the same idea as him. Hopefully, the bar wouldn’t be too crowded with tourists. The beaten looking pickups parked outside annoyed him mildly - the idea of eating his dinner on his bed in his trailer out back due to lack of space did not excite him. His interaction with the city boy earlier had put him in a strange mood, and he had hoped that sitting amongst friendly faces, (but not _too_ many friendly faces) listening to people chatter around him would take him out of it again.

It was strange, Craig always felt uneasy when faced with people from the cities. Maybe it was because of his roots outside the Basin ranges - no matter how long he stayed here, and no matter how many names he learned to know, he still felt a little bit like an outsider and that wasn’t for want of trying to forget the outside. He wasn’t born here, like most of these people, and sometimes seeing other outside folk was like seeing faded photos of relatives he shared history with, that he had he laughed and cried and ate with in the past, but he didn’t actually like.

It was unsettling, and frankly he would rather forget it.

He was relieved to pass inside and find that the large congregation of people milling around the area were not in fact coming to the hotel for dinner, but to sit and watch a film in the large lounge at the back. From time to time, when Kenny was bored and the people demanded it, the hotel also served as the local cinema. The poster Ken had tacked in the window informed him that the movie screening today was 'Lord of Illusions'. Craig had watched this film drunk once, with his college roommate, and the fond memories he had of this experience were some of the few he retained from his post high-school days.

When he wiped his shoes on the doormat and wandered into the bar, he found it comfortably occupied by people, a handful of whom nodded at him as he passed. As he made his way to the stools the beer taps, he decided that tonight, he would treat himself and get a full roast dinner if there was any to be had.

He treated himself most nights, given the opportunity to do so.

"Well hey there, Craig. Long day?"

The familiar voice of Butters Stotch, a chipper southerner who had inherited the hotel (and many other important buildings in Barbelo) from his property investor father, resounded across the bar. Favouring a humble, hands-on form of interaction with his clientele, Butters could often be found serving drinks and cooking dinners in his homely chequered apron most nights of the week, and tonight he busied himself washing glasses, and setting them on the drying rack next to the bar sink. Craig liked Butters about as much as he liked Kenny – that is to say he would probably be able to have an extended conversation with him without experiencing too much discomfort. As Butters had often expressed a dislike for Barbelo and its tight-knit culture in the past, he sometimes felt that, in a way two of them were outsiders together.

In the far corner, under the stuffed buffalo head Kenny had affectionately named Eric, the local hairdresser was sharing a meal with her husband and infant daughter, who was busy trying to drown her teddy bear in orange juice. Four of the fourteen teenagers in Barbelo (led by the eldest, Ike Broflovski) were by the window, sharing a pitcher of ginger beer and gossiping about the ones who were not in attendance. Several farmers, a young woman Craig knew only as 'Red' who did not speak to anyone and read thick books by authors long deceased, and the amiable Token (the local sheriff) made up the rest. Craig was considering asking for his meal to be delivered to that table, and eating with Token in order to quiz him on what the local law enforcement officials thought about reports of the upcoming apocalypse, when Butters coughed quietly and interrupted his train of thought.

"Now Craig. I don’t mean to alarm you, but that stranger over there is staring at you somethin' fierce."

Craig craned his neck around to look to the far end of the bar, where at a small table tucked far in the corner, the blond-haired green-eyed city boy was seated, watching him with wide, lamplight eyes.

What the fuck? Had he gotten lost or something? Why in the name of hell was he still here?

Craig scowled when they made eye contact, and the strange boy flushed, looking down at the bowl of soup he was nursing as though breaking eye contact might have tricked Craig into believing he hadn’t been watching.

Uneasy, Craig looked away and tried not to look too pissed off about it. He shrugged, and told Butters he wanted the largest plate of the fanciest food he had. Butters smiled sheepishly, and returned with a large bowl of minestrone and a dinner roll.

"Sorry," he said, although he didn’t sound that sorry at all. "Kenny spent the day in the city and I had to go over to the museum building all day. There was a real nasty incident with a few of the appliances in the staff office so neither of us had time to cook a decent dinner."

"Ugh. Tell me you have dessert?"

"Cheesecake, actually. Ken got it from the store in the city."

 He grinned, and slung the damp tea towel on his shoulder down. It landed on the bar with a wet slap.

 "He picked up some new cleaning gear for you too, by the way. I told him to leave it by the trailer before he started the movie."

"Cool. Thanks."

Craig had wanted a new broom to sweep his caravan with for _ages_. He drew the bowl of soup and menial portion of bread close to him, and watched Butters wipe down the bar with hunched shoulders and a strange, spreading feeling of discomfort he couldn’t put his finger on. It felt weird - like he used to remember feeling as a child, when he had to go down into his parent’s basement alone. There wasn’t anything _immediately_ wrong, but there was certainly an air of something not being completely right, and it wasn’t disembodied it was in _everything_. Eric’s dead glass eyes were looking at him too harshly. The sound of Red turning pages on her books distressed him. He remembered fleetingly, the feeling of the walls closing in and the world spinning a little bit faster than he was able to process a long, long time ago, but just like the dark period of his life he called college the feeling passed and he kept his eyes focused on the shiny streaks Butters’ cloth left on the bar top. He wondered if this was the foreboding feeling of approaching rain the older locals often reported feeling.

The soup was good to taste, but he found it a little gritty.

"You know," Butters startled him, placing a glass bottle of ca-Cola in front of his plate and jolting him from thoughts about billowing grey clouds, "He’s still staring. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he’s never seen a guy in a singlet before."

"He fuckin’ has. He came to the garage earlier. I think he’s one of the Foundation sorts. Asked me for directions to the compound and all that." Craig’s skin crawled on his shoulders, to know that the boy was still staring, still watching him with eyes the colour of the sea that he hadn’t seen in years. He felt very self-conscious of his freckles then, and the dirt and oil on his upper arms and in his hair. And the fact that he hadn’t put on any deodorant since... about eight months ago.

"Really?!" Butters looked shocked. "But he’s so normal looking!"

Craig understood what he meant. Usually the Foundation recruits came in bed sheets with shaved bald heads. They drove white vans with bumper stickers of grey aliens and the crucified Christ. They definitely did not wear ray-bans or keep empty coffee cups in their back seat. It occurred to Craig that he might be an academic or something, conducting a weird or unimportant survey. It seemed more likely than the alternative, because honestly Craig couldn’t imagine this boy chopping off all of his stupid hair.

"I dunno. Maybe he’s just having a look. I don’t know if he intends to join them or anything."

'Hmm..." Butters leant low over the bar and slitted his eyes over Craig’s shoulder. "Do you reckon he knows we know he’s staring?"

"Nope. But if you stare any harder he will."

"Maybe you should go over there and talk to him?"

Craig was offended that Butters would even dare to suggest such a thing.

“I what?"

"You know! Go over. Talk to him and find out what he knows. Maybe he’s a reporter? We could get in a _real_ newspaper. That'd be real cool I reckon.”  
  
"Yeah," Craig told him in disgust. "Cool for _you_."

Butters looked at him like a resigned mother might look at an unnecessarily bratty little child, and he knew he didn’t really have that much of a choice. He groaned, frustrated that his curiosity was starting to stir again and decided he may as well act like he didn’t want to do this a little longer. Just for the heck of it. The stranger was unlikely to be going anywhere tonight, anyway.

"You are one of the most unfriendly people I’ve ever met."

"It’s a self-defence strategy. You wouldn’t understand."

And he wasn’t lying - Butters was a pretty relaxed and likeable kind of guy. His best defence was that particular kind of uncompromising optimism that tended to make others a little in awe. He rolled his eyes, and pulled a large, dusty glass down off the liquor shelf behind the bar.

"You’re taking him a beer," Butters told him firmly, pulling a gush of golden foaming alcohol into the glass without bothering to wipe it off. "And you can’t argue. If you’d do it for your mother, you’d do it for me and besides, _look_ at him! The poor guy. He looks like a sparrow trapped in a house or something."

Craig risked a glimpse over his shoulder to see if that was true. It wasn’t false. Although he did find the way the boy stirred his soup, while failing to discretely watch him out of the corner of his eye, somewhat disconcerting. He certainly looked a little ruffled, and a little unhappy, and maybe he was a little sparrow after all, trapped in the glasshouse of the Basin alone. Craig sighed, and reached for the tall glass of beer. His soup was only half eaten, but considering how badly he had wanted a roast dinner earlier Craig was surprised that he no longer had any appetite.

'Do _I_ get a beer?"

Craig hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol since he had moved to the town. If Butters knew anything of his history of intoxication through college, he hid it well, because these days he treated Craig like he was the president of the local temperance club. He shook his head an increment, and pushed his barely touched bottle of coke towards him insistently.

"That’s on the house. Now hurry up! He’s been there forty minutes, and no one has paid him any attention at all. He must think the people out here are horrible!"

Butters always got irrationally excited whenever an outsider passed through, flicking on his star host switch and making sure everyone knew how much he doted on strangers in their midst. Craig had never figured out why that might have been. It seemed like an illogical amount of effort, because excepting himself every single stranger who came through left them all behind eventually, and really Butters would be better to keep his hospitality for his own.

Maybe he just missed being around people from the outside.

He slid out of his seat, and picked up both of the drinks. A tiredness that was not unfamiliar to him settled in the muscles in his back and in his arms, and he wondered if he would sleep well tonight or if he would lie awake and restless, staring at the shadows the starlight cast on his trailer ceiling.

He would worry about things like that later. Right now, he needed to survive this encounter. Again. The same encounter he had already had earlier that day. He already had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go - if he said something wrong, the stranger would laugh at him, or worse than that the stranger would lean back and look down his ever so slightly crooked nose.

_Why are you even talking to me? Who do you think you are?_

Craig made a point of not being anyone, in particular. As such, he found it deeply jarring when the strange boy noticed his approach and stared at him as though he might have just grown a large and very distinctive second head.

"... This seat taken?" he asked, cocking his singular head to the empty chair opposite him and setting the drinks down on the table. The boy pressed his lips together, removed his left foot from the spot it had occupied resting on the edge of the chair, and scooted back a little, like he was preparing to stand up and walk promptly away.

"No. I mean, I was resting my foot on it, but technically speaking I guess... no."

Craig stared at him a moment, observing the way in which he refused to make eye contact, despite having spent at least ten minutes glaring at him from across the room.

"Well then I’m going to go ahead and sit down then. Here. This is for you," he skid the beer a little closer to him across the table, and it left a wet stripe on the polished wood. "From Butters. Welcome to the town or something. I dunno."

The seat creaked under his weight when he sat down on it, and he missed his bar stool and the relative isolation it provided. His table mate eyed the beer suspiciously, like he didn’t trust either the contents or the person providing it, but eventually he softened and pulled it closer. He refrained from bringing the beer to his lips, however, and Craig suspected that he never would.

"Great. Thanks."

The conversation lulled and awkwardly, Craig made himself comfortable. He found the table too low and too small for his legs - whichever way he sat his knees pressed uncomfortably against the underside, and if he stuck his legs out to the side he risked tripping someone up on their way to the bathroom just a few metres away. It occurred to him that this was probably why the strange boy had his feet up on the seat he was currently occupying. Craig had gone a long time without coming face to face with someone as tall as he was.

It also occurred to him that he couldn’t keep calling this guy 'the stranger', and so it was he decided that he may as well ask.

"I didn’t get your name earlier?"

At first, he thought he wasn’t going to get a response. The look of aversion he was regarded with could have made milk turn sour in the udder. But then

"It’s stupid. I can’t tell you. People at school called me Tweek, though. So you can call me that too, I suppose."

Craig though that that sounded stupider than any name he could think of, but held his tongue.

"I’m Craig," he said politely. 'I’m the mechanic here."

"Yeah. I know. Some mechanic though."

Craig arched his eyebrows, trying to figure out what that might mean. Was it a jibe? A mockery? A compliment? And to think Craig had been nice enough to give him a discount! 

"Alright," he said coolly, trying to return the unkind look he was receiving except better. "You got me. I’m an astronomer. But there aren’t many places hiring for that skill around these parts, you know?"

This made Tweek smile uncomfortably, and Craig got the impression that he was doing so against his will. His effort to resist was evident in the crease that appeared between his eyebrows and the way his eyes kept sliding downwards, fixing on the table and his drink and the rings of moisture it left in its wake. 

“I didn’t mean it like that," he replied.

Craig didn’t know exactly how else there was to mean it. They fell silent again, and moodily he sipped his coke, studying the walls from slightly closer than usual and scowling when Butters gave him a bright thumbs-up from behind the bar.

What an asshole.

Craig drew a deep breath and had a mouthful of Coke.

"I guess you couldn’t find the compound then?"

"Mm... No. I mean, yes I couldn’t find it. But also no, that’s not the main problem. I started off road in the direction you sent me but..." here he trailed off, and a distinctly frustrated expression passed over his features. "My car broke down a few miles off the road. I don’t know what happened. It was fine, and then suddenly boom. I thought I was going to die?"

Craig raised his eyebrows and thought that sounded like an unusual occurrence, even given the trouble that the sand tended to give older, two wheel drive cars.

"It just broke down?" he asked, "like... stopped working? Was it the brakes? The clutch? What?"

Tweek wiggled uncomfortably in his chair and tried not to look Craig in the eye. His shoulders pulled into a shrug and Craig realised that the guy _wasn’t_ actually standoffish as much as he was shy and obviously uncomfortable being this far from home. 

Not that that made Craig like dislike him any less.

"Well, it didn’t just stop working. There was a whole lot of white steam first, and then it just... you know. The engine died. Stopped working."

Craig frowned. That sounded like it could have been a busted pipe or something. He would have to have a look at it before he could be sure.

"Oh. Well do you want me to check it out?"

The boy frowned, eyes lifting from the table surface and delivering the most lingering, most suspicious look Craig had ever received in his life.

"Are you really the only mechanic in the town?" He asked tentatively. Craig scoffed and considered thrusting a rude gesture straight into his dumb sunburned face.

"Pshh... fine. Whatever then. I won’t check it out. You can borrow a jack tomorrow morning then and go fix it yourself."

He was just about to stand up and stalk off when Tweek sat bolt upright in his seat and went to grab him

"No!” He seemed positively desperate to avoid being abandoned again, his body tense like he was experiencing some kind of physical threat. Craig really did not like the way he had momentarily seemed like he was going to grab him. He hadn’t had any physical contact with a person for _months_. Just thinking about it made his skin crawl.

“Fuck, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Jesus Christ I’m sorry. Don’t get offended, it’s lonely sitting here by myself and I think everyone in the place is staring at me!"

Craig had to crane his neck around to check if that was true. It kind of was. All of the locals were peering toward their corner fleetingly, from the edges of their eyes, and now Craig had noticed it he felt strangely self-aware and uncomfortable himself.

He sunk back down into his seat and Tweek relaxed.

"If I sit you’re going to have to be a little more fucking polite."

"I am polite! Aren’t I? Why? Did I say something impolite?"

Wow.

Craig could hardly believe this. He shook his head and rested his elbows back against the table.

"Don’t worry," he grumbled, eyeing the untouched beer still sitting between them. "Don’t fucking even worry. So where did you say your car was again?"

Tweek gnawed his bottom lip, staring unabashedly at him now as though he was trying to read his mind and figure out what it was he had done that had seemed rude.

"It’s in the desert," he offered as explanation. "Just a couple of miles out. I drove it directly off the road where you sent me."

"Uh huh..." Craig tried to remember the direction he had sent him, and came up with nothing. "Well... okay. I guess we are going to have to send someone out to get it."

Tweek nodded.

"Okay, but can you fix it please as soon as possible? I’m kind of in a rush. I have to be at the Foundation in three days."

"Yeah? Well if you’re heading for the compound three days is a long time to wait. As far as they are concerned the world starts ending yesterday."

This made Tweek smile a hesitant, half-smile, and he shook his head as though he was privy to something Craig needed not know.

"Just… three days. Okay?"

Craig’s reluctant curiosity doubled, and he was struck once more by how out of place this guy looked in the middle of nowhere. The sunburn on his cheeks betrayed the long walk he had had to make back to Barbelo, but besides that he looked like any old kid from a college campus. A boy next door. The barista who used to make Craig’s coffee when he was still at university.

"... You know, most of the people who head out to the compound. They're a little bit... uh?" he pointed his finger at his temple, indicating mental instability in a way that hopefully Tweek would understand. Tweek nodded and started working his bottom lip with his teeth again.

"Funny. Everyone says the same thing about desert people too," he glanced at the people crammed into the bar, some laughing and drinking and others eating alone. They were a loud and overly familiar group, and admittedly some were missing a few teeth, but he was right in pointing out that the idea of small town folk being threatening or mentally deviant was erroneous. None of them looked _dangerous_ , and Craig knew from experience that around these parts, people had big hearts.

"Alright. I will give you that. But what I was getting at was more like... well. Sorry not sorry if this sounds rude but you don’t really fit the profile of the people who come out here usually. It’s a really specific type of person, and you seem more… like a regular guy."

A little frazzled, sure, but predominantly normal.

This made Tweek’s eyebrows fly up, and the corners of his lips twitched in surprise.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Maybe I am just good at acting?"

Craig felt himself warm to him, just a little bit.

"Maybe."

And they were silent, although the silence wasn’t entirely uncomfortable.

 

...

 

By the time 11pm rolled around, and the people in the pub started clearing out, Craig remembered that he couldn’t just sit here with this traveller making petty conversation all evening - he had an empty trailer and a whole season of Speed Racer to get through before the morning. Their conversation, while tolerable, was not all that significant or helpful in his everyday life – Tweek had a few questions about the economy of the town, and the sorts of people who passed by, and Craig was happy enough to provide basic answers although he had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t really wise, to make friends with transitionals. They always ended up leaving and he never heard from them again.  
He was just about to stop the other boy from talking (he had just spent the last half hour being subjected to tentative interrogation about his qualifications and study experience) and excuse himself when he felt a hand come down on the back of the seat behind him, and for the second time that evening he very nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Holy shit Kenny! What the fuck?"

Kenny beamed at him and waved a tea towel in his face.

"You two look like you are having a real good chatter over here. But I’m afraid you are going to have to go. The Movie over in the back room, so Butts and me are getting ready to close up now."

"... You’re closing?" Tweek seemed distressed, and it was remarkable how fast he sprung from calm and talkative to tense and obviously uncomfortable. Craig had never in his entire life met anyone quite so neurotic. "Does this place close overnight?"

"Duh. This isn’t a big city all night bar you know. There’s only me and you-know-who here running it all." He cocked his head towards the bar, where Butters was meticulously wiping glasses and setting them in racks where they belonged.

"I hope you don’t plan on staying the night, by the way. All our rooms are took up. Its UFO season, you know. All the overnight tour busses pass through on the weekends." He erected himself and glanced down at the still untouched and probably lukewarm beer on the table, next to Craig’s empty coke.

Tweek seemed absolutely stricken.

"There’s no rooms here?"

Kenny shook his head sympathetically.

"Nothing. If you’re quick, you could hit up one of the locals to let you crash on the sofa. Red’s pretty friendly, and all she has for company is her cats."

All of the colour drained out of Tweek’s face, and Craig felt incredibly sorry for him - their exchange over the last part of the evening may not have answered his questions about why Tweek was joining the Foundation, but it had undoubtedly assured him that whatever his aims and whatever his motivations, Tweek was a likeable, albeit excruciatingly nervous sort of guy. Craig felt a little bad for thinking so poorly of him initially, but perhaps the problem was that he just wasn’t good at making first impressions. Craig had a sneaking suspicion he was aware of this, as well.

“I can’t do that!"

Clearly, the notion scandalised him.

"Well, you are probably going to have to. Sorry buddy. Nothing personal," Kenny clapped him on the shoulder shortly and Tweek looked like he was going to have a heart attack.

Craig could have wrung Kenny’s neck. What the fuck was he supposed to do with the guy now? He couldn’t invite him back to the caravan and babysit him.

Or rather, he didn’t want to.   
  
Regrettably, he realised that he didn’t actually have much of a choice.

Craig sighed and raked his hand through his hair.

"You can come stay with me if you want to," he invited. "I have a stretcher in my caravan out back. Or a cot. Whatever you call it."

Tweek swivelled intensely green eyes in his direction. All of the colour had drained from his cheeks in worry, and the stark contrast of green on white was flattering, if unnerving.

"Really?"

His intense staring was making Craig uncomfortable.

"Sure. I mean, I don’t have sheets or a spare pillow or anything, but it’s pretty warm so it won’t matter. As long as you don’t mind sitting quietly while I watch stuff on my laptop."

Craig thought such a qualifier to be important - he wasn’t really eager to have a houseguest as it was, let alone one who was going to tell him to turn his computer off so he could get some sleep.

He shouldn’t have worried. Tweek was too busy being amazed that anyone out here in the middle of nowhere even had a laptop to begin with. Craig scowled, and informed him that he actually had internet access too - small town folk weren’t as cut off from civilization as they were made out to be.

His personal opinion, however, was that this was at best a mixed blessing.

 

...

 

Craig’s caravan was compact, but actually quite nice as far as caravans went - it had enough room for a bed, a kitchenette, and minifridge, and a bathroom he usually avoided using because if he did that he would have to empty the waste tanks regularly. The walk to the back of the pub was only a few metres anyway, and there was a perfectly good shower and toilet just through the rear entrance door. Butters never bothered locking the back of the place - the only danger of an unlocked door around here was alien abduction and honestly, if aliens wanted to abduct a guy that badly they could probably do it whether the door was left locked or not.

All the same, Craig felt very self-conscious as he showed Tweek through the skinny entrance in the side of his quarters. Even more so when he remembered that he had a whole pile of dirty glasses in the sink, and an unusual number of telescope parts scattered over the bed and floor. He advised Tweek to step carefully as he ushered him toward the tidier bed-end of the space, and after bringing in the mop and broom Kenny had deposited outside his door earlier that afternoon he began picking all the pieces up as carefully as possible.

"... It’s kind of small," Tweek observed, as Craig straightened up and set a large lens on top of his cute little microwave. "Will a stretcher even fit in here?"

"Yeah. Just here in the kitchen."

He gestured to the skinny gap between his kitchenette counter and the large storage cupboards against the opposite side, where the two of them were standing. It was probably three feet across at best, and if they were to place a stretcher there it would indubitably block the passage between the end of the van Craig would occupy, and the door. Tweek seemed thoroughly unconvinced, but he said nothing, pressing himself against the cupboard so Craig could squeeze past and fetch the stretcher from under his bed.

"... I like these."

Craig stood up, fold away stretcher bag in hand, and frowned at him over his shoulder.

'What?"

"These." Tweek pointed to the blown up photographs of galaxies and nebulas stuck with yellowing tape to Craig’s cupboards and ceiling. Most of them he had ripped from text books and outdated national geographic magazines. Craig also liked them, or else he wouldn’t have stuck them on his walls.

'Thanks. I have this too."

He pointed at the roof above his bed, the largest empty space in his entire van, and the meticulously translated  diagram of the constellations of the northern hemisphere painted in glow-in-the-dark paint.

"You like space." Tweek observed, peering upwards. "I thought you were joking about the astronomer thing but I guess not."

"You guess not," Craig smirked and passed him the bag containing the stretcher. The poles clanked together inside and Tweek eyed it just as suspiciously as he had eyed his beer earlier. "I do like some other things, but mostly... I’m a pretty boring guy."

"Yeah?" Tweek turned his eyes to him again, and again (every fucking time) the colour was disarming. Unsettling. Almost like it shouldn’t really be. "Same. I think you’re a little bit interesting though. I mean, you’re a bit weird. Don’t be offended, but uh... hm."

He looked vaguely troubled, and vaguely out of place, standing awkwardly in the middle of Craig’s caravan.

Craig decided it was too late to be offended about it.

 

 _And there was evening_ _,_ _and there was morning_ _\--_ the first day.


	3. PART ONE - CHAPTER TWO

The sun rose at five am, but as always Craig continued to sleep until seven. He would have probably slept longer, but he set an alarm most mornings to prevent exactly that from happening. When he rolled over to shut off the incessant digital beeping that roused him, the recollection of what had transpired the night before remained unmanifest at the very back of his mind. Even as a relatively well adjusted child, Craig had been reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings, but ever since the years he spent at college he had been worse than that. In fact, first thing in the morning, Craig was usually borderline suicidal – it often took a good ten or fifteen minutes of lying on his back staring at the faded shapes of the constellations on his ceiling for him to pull himself together and find the motivation to get out of bed.

The first thing he did once he sat up was reach for his pill bottle, which he kept on the shallow little windowsill next to his bed. He swallowed two Paroxetine without water and rubbed the crust of sleep from the rims of his eyes. Only after he had done all this did he spot the edge of the stretcher in his peripheral vision, and everything that had preceded came back to him with a sudden intensity.

He sat up straight and frowned, and his unbrushed hair sticking up and looking comical as he regarded the scene choreographed in front of him.

The stretcher was empty. And someone had made the effort to neatly fold and stack the spare shirt and sweatpants Craig had lent them on the end closest to Craig’s bed. The door to the caravan was ajar and, much to his annoyance, a small drift of sand dust had blown inside, dirtying the floor under the stretcher and buffering fine salty red onto the door of his storage cupboard.

He swore loudly and pulled himself to his feet. The gap between the top of his head and the ceiling was two inches at best. He grabbed the tank top and shorts he had worn yesterday and swapped them out for the too-big t-shirt and sweatpants he slept in, before stumbling over the stretcher awkwardly toward the door.

"Tweek you complete shithead oh my god."

Sand crunched under his feet as he bounded down the caravan steps, and the brightness of the outdoors blinded him for a moment - the sunlight reflected of the whitewashed back of the pub made his head swim, and he gripped the handle of his caravan door tightly in disorientation. Almost passing out first thing in the morning was probably a symptom of some kind of disorder Craig didn’t care to know about. He took his time adjusting, and once he knew he wasn’t going to faint he let go of the door and wandered around the backside of his abode.

"Tweek?"

Not spotting him was a little disconcerting. He wondered briefly if he had gone back out into the desert to find his car or back into the pub to find some food. Perhaps he had disappeared into the great salty wasteland beyond the town, never to be seen again. He wouldn’t be the first, and he wouldn’t be the last, but for some reason, thinking about this made Craig a little sad. He ought to feel no great affection for someone who had single-handedly imported a sand dune into his home, but it had been such a long time since he had lain awake and listened to the restless sounds of someone else not-sleeping a few feet from him and the experience, while awkward, had been oddly comforting.

He was thinking about how long it would be before he had a conversation with someone who wasn’t a local again, when he rounded the front side of the caravan and almost tripped over his guest sitting cross legged in the shade between the caravan and the building it was parked behind.

"Dude!"

He was startled, but not as startled as Tweek, who yelped and immediately leapt to his feet, brushing fine red dust off backs of his legs. Craig found he looked more like the eccentric religious sort today, in his flannel shirt and billowing khaki harem pants. He gave him a slow once over, trying not to betray too much of his distaste, but despite his best efforts Tweek was still clearly uncomfortable with being examined. He scratched the side of his nose and looked down at the scrubby patch he had flattened with his ass instead of looking at Craig’s face. Perhaps he should have felt a little more self-conscious about that anyway - the area around this side of the van looked like a cyclone had passed through it. A large duffel bag Craig had never seen before sat on the cracked and faded plastic chair against the wall of the pub, and its contents spilled out onto the dirt. Craig eyed the paraphernalia; a heap of clothes; a folder of notes and papers; a Canadian passport. He figured that Tweek had probably never experienced the unpleasantness that was rubbing sand out of his shirts for days.

He was about to.

"Morning." Tweek mumbled, still staring down at his bare feet. He sounded like he had spent the whole night eating sand. "I’m still here, by the way. Sorry. I hope that’s okay?"

Craig didn’t really know where to start.

"... What are you doing?" he asked, studying the stack of faded newspapers next to the duffel bag on the chair. "You know you left my door open?"

"Did I? Oh God. I’m sorry. I couldn’t do the lock and I just... I didn’t want to overstay my welcome? I woke up early so I went out to try find my car but I couldn’t move it an inch so I grabbed my stuff and brought it back and here I am." He brought his hand up to his mouth and started nibbling the corner of his thumbnail. Craig furrowed his brows, and looked back to the squashed patch in the shade of his van. How in the hell was he supposed to fix that? Not that it mattered.

"You could’ve woke me up and gotten my help," he said coolly. "Also, why were you sitting out here? It’s a million degrees."

"Not in the shade. I was meditating." Tweek dropped his hand and started cramming his clothes and the newspapers back into his bag. “It’s good for that, out here. Really quiet and clear, you know?"

Craig didn't know, although he had heard it discussed among the new-age alien hunters who buzzed about the place like a swarm of camera-waving mosquitos.

"Yeah. We have a policy about that phenomenon you know.”

The ‘official’ stance was easy to find, if one knew where to look for it. Mostly, it was accessible in flyers given out at information sites, or on the lips of locals who traded on the naivety of the tourists. The story went that the Radiant Basin, if nothing else, was conducive to spiritual enlightenment and alien activities because it acted as an intersection between this universe and others. Craig, however, like most people who weren't eager to believe the superstitions of tourists, held that claims about the capabilities of a place to refract and redirect energy into a separate universal plane were dubious, at best.

“… Really?”

“Yeah. But if you want a professional opinion, it’s fuckin’ dumb.”

Tweek gave him a tight smile and hitched his full bag up onto his shoulder.

"You know, for an astronomer, you are kind of a sceptic."

Craig snorted and pulled his shoulder into a shrug.

"As far as I’m concerned the two things are synonymous. You want breakfast? I can walk out with you to your car later and see what I can do?"

Craig would never admit it, but he was glad that Tweek was still going to be around for a few hours longer. The other boy nodded, and they rounded the corner of the caravan, squeezing through the skinny gap between the building and the side and pausing for a moment by the door, so Tweek could drop his stuff off inside.

"Oh, and that reminds me." Craig told him, taking care to close the door again properly, "You need to clean my floor before I let you go. It’s like the Sahara in there you know."

Tweek didn’t say he wouldn’t, so Craig assumed that meant he would be honoured.

 

...

 

As usual, the Hotel breakfast was eggs and toast, and for Tweek this was in addition to the largest cup of coffee Kenny could possibly provide. After the hesitance with which he had treated his beer the night before, Craig was surprised to see him eating so heartily. He shovelled egg and bread into his face with a haste that may have been shocking, if Craig had been of the easily-offended variety.

"Hungry?" he asked politely, after Tweek had polished off his second plate and chased it with a half mug of straight black Brazilian Roast. Tweek nodded, and rubbed his mouth shamelessly on the back of his hand.

"Starving."

His eyes flickered down, to Craig’s crusts left sitting on the edge of his plate. Incredulous, Craig pushed the plate towards him in an invitation to go ahead and clean up after him. It took all the self-control he had to keep his expression neutral. If he allowed himself to smile, or left himself be endeared to this character any more than he was already, then it would be exponentially more difficult to watch him go.

"You know," Craig placed his hands on the table in front of him and scratched over a shallow gouge in the wood top. "You never _actually_ told me what business you have at the compound."

Tweek cocked his head and studied him, his eyes silted like he was trying to establish whether or not it was wise to disclose his motivations.

"I dunno if I want to," he said eventually, and the words hung there in the silence for a few seconds uncontested. "Not because it’s a secret or anything. But cause... hm." his lips thinned and Craig thought he saw a flicker of irritation pass over his features.

"’Cause what?"

"’Cause you’ll laugh at me?"

It was kind of annoying, the way in which Tweek ended almost every sentence with a question.

Craig’s eyes fluttered, and he considered telling him that if he was here for the reason Craig suspected, it wasn’t _funny_ so much as immensely unfortunate. He considered pointing out that no-one at the compound was allowed to drink coffee - it was considered abhorrent for Disciples to consume substances that might make them impure. Maybe that would deter him a little? Make him think twice about wandering out into the wastelands and becoming lost to civilization with the rest?

He chastised himself immediately for letting his not-entirely-negative feelings towards this person sway his resolve to remain impartial. Whatever spiritual journey Tweek happened to be on was his own goddamned business.

"Whatever then," he sighed, stacking their plates and making ready to leave. "But you know, whatever reason you give me, I'm certain I would have heard it before."

They set out on foot at ten am, just as the day was starting to sizzle. Craig was sure to slather on a sensible amount of well expired sun block on his forearms - purely for the sake of keeping up appearances in front of this, a man who had clearly never seen a bottle of banana boat in his lifetime.

"You want some?" he asked, offering Tweek the dusty tube of lotion as they swerved off the compacted dirt road that lead out toward the Basin rim, and into the flat sun parched void of scrub  beyond. A shallow yre trail, by winds blustering sand over the hollows left by the treads, indicated that Tweek’s shitty sigma was approximately north west of Barbelo, and if it had taken him an hour and seven minutes to walk out there this morning, and fifty eight minutes to walk back, (as per his reporting’s) Craig supposed the car was between two and three miles out. Not an unreasonable journey, but probably a nauseating distance to cover when it was upwards of ninety degrees outside.

Tweek declined the suntan lotion. He mumbled something about dangerous chemicals and skin cancer, but did not try and explain further. Craig slipped the tube back into his satchel, alongside the few panners and rags he had dropped in there before they left, and again elected not to say anything.

Tweek scratched at the peeling skin on his upper arms and turned his face upwards, to the empty sky. For a moment Craig thought he might say something, but he didn’t. The sun glinted on the shiny gold arms of his sunglasses and an unmarked and unfamiliar speck, probably a weather balloon of some persuasion, passed overhead. Not a single breeze wicked away the sweat that was starting to bead on the nape of Craig’s neck.

He remembered about twenty minutes into their walk that there were particularly venomous snakes out here, in the dessert, slithering around on their bellies and going about their little snake lives. Hopefully, their humble party of two would not encounter any on their journey, because if they had the misfortune of being bitten by a poisonous one the nearest hospital was a decent three hours drive away. When Craig told him this, Tweek (who had already walked this way three times in the last twenty four hours) insisted they pick up speed so intensely that they completed the journey to the vehicle in just under fifty minutes. By the time Craig arrived he was so sweaty and exhausted that he had to sit down for a moment in the passenger side and wind down.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered, fiddling with  all of the dashboard knobs and dials he could get his hands on while Tweek, terrified of snakes in a way Craig couldn’t rationally comprehend, climbed into the drivers side and slammed the door. "Which one of these fuckers is the air con?"

"I don’t have any," Tweek told him, checking the back of his car to make sure that either A: his coffee cup collection was still there or B: there were absolutely no snakes sitting buckled in the backseat. "Wind the window down or something?"

Craig (who had not yet closed the passenger door) looked at him in disbelief, and wondered how it was Tweek wasn’t _dying_. He looked like he had just spent twenty four hours in a microwave - when he removed his sunglasses and dropped them onto his dash, the line distinguishing the red on his cheeks and the circles of pale white skin around his eyes was so sharp it looked drawn on, and his hair (which he hadn’t bothered to tie up or brush or anything) was sticking to the side of his face in long sweaty strings. Nonetheless, Tweek seemed just as alert as usual, and his hands didn’t even tremor when he patted around in his pockets for the car keys and slotted the correct one into the ignition.

"You go outside and fix it," said shortly, eyes combing the horizon as though a large entourage of something Truly Awful was going to slither over it at any moment. "I will stay in here, if that’s okay?"

Craig regretted even mentioning the words 'pit vipers', but said he could make that work if Tweek allowed him a few minutes to cool down.

"You brought the water Ken gave us right?"

Tweek nodded and slid his backpack off his shoulder, onto his lap. The large bottle of springwater he extracted was easily the most perfect thing Craig had ever seen in his life. He drunk a quarter in one go, and would have drunk more if Tweek hadn’t snatched it off him and reminded him that some of it was supposed to be for the radiator, please don’t ruin everything and strand us out here because no way in _hell_ is he walking back through that snake hole.

"Jeez, alright. I’ll just go ahead and die. Then you can fix your dumb car yourself."

Craig climbed out of the vehicle anyway, and dumped his satchel full of spanners on the dust. He regretted not bringing a roller board, and for the first time he felt a little uneasy about snakes himself, because gosh it was gloomy under the car and gosh, it was low to the ground.

He grit his teeth and slithered under there anyway, unleashing the limbless reptile himself, and found it to be pleasantly cool under the sigma’s large rusty belly.

The sand wasted no time getting into his eyes.

"Heyweek?" He called to the boy through the thin metal of the chassis, and waited for confirmation that he had been heard.

"What?"

"Do you have a torch or something? I can’t see shit."

With considerable difficulty, given his refusal to step outside the safety of the vehicle,passed him a hefty hunting torch. Although the batteries were a little weakit certainly served its purpose well. Craig was relieved to see that most of the mechanisms and do-hickeys on this particular part of the vehicle matched the sizes of equipment he had lugged along. God bless the predictability of Japanese cars. He spent a few minutes feeling around with his hands to establish if there was anything immediately wrong with the bits and pieces above him, (something he knew that anyone who valued their digits he should probably NEVER do,) and after finding nothing he sighed because that meant he was probably going to have to do something more intensive. Unscrew some stuff, oil some other stuff up, maybe replace a few valves...

Actually, before he did anything else, he should probably checknder the hood of the car. This should have been an obvious first point of call, and when he crawled out and told Tweek this, Tweek looked like he didn’t know whether to start laughing or crying.

"You’re the actual worst mechanic who ever lived." 

"I guess so."

He raised the hood of the car, and just as with the underside he found not a single fault anywhere. Not one.

This was unfortunate. Most of Craig’s mechanical successes in the past were the result of the owners of the vehicles he worked on already knowing exactly what was wrong. It was hard to be confused over what needed fixing when a spark plug had ejected itself from an engine at a hundred miles an hour.

He slammed the front hatch and peered at Tweek’s dark figure on the other side of the glazed windshield.

"What did you say happened to the car again?" He asked. "Exactly?"

"It uh... it stopped working? I was driving, and first the radio went out, and then steam, and then without warning the engine just stopped. It didn’t even start burning."

"You still have petrol?"

"Of course, man! You filled it up yourself."

Craig chewed the inside of his cheek and looked down at the oil and grease engrained in the creases of his hands. That was weird as hell... he had never heard of a car just _stopping_ before. Ceasingwith a full tank and no smoke and not a single sign to indicate it was about to do so. Admittedly, he was no expert, but the thought of such a thing happening sat weird in his brain - like he had some kind of primal aversion to it. Insofar as Craig could tell, something that adhered to all the principles of physics and mechanical engineering easing to function was impossible. Therefore, Tweek must have missed some important incident in his recollection of exact events.

He climbed back into the passenger seat, and dropped his satchel down by his feet.

"Well okay. Turn on the ignition for me?"

Tweek gave him an unreadable look, but did as he was told.

Nothing happened. Nothing. The engine didn’t turn over and the starter didn’t begin to growl. But this was impossible because the sparkplugs, the cables, and everything else about the car had been (according to Craig’s opinion) in perfect order. Tweek turned the key back to idle, and offered to show him what had happened to the radio.

"... Okay? Sure, if you want to."

Tweek reached past him and turned the dial, and Craig wished he had given him a little warning because the sudden loud scratching noise that came out of the speakers was startling for anyone, particularly someone who had not been expecting it. The sound was halfway between static and the unholy noise that happened when someone scraped a nail over corrugated iron. Craig immediately told him to shut it off, and Tweek looked at him in despair.

"Can you imagine how horrifying that was for me?"

Craig thought he had a pretty good idea. He sighed, and said what he had started to suspect since he had first opened the hatch, and seen that not one of the spark plugs had ejected itself from the engine at no less than a hundred miles an hour.

"I have no idea what’s wrong. I’m going to have to get Kenny to tow it back with the pickup so I can look at it in the shop."

He could tell before he finished saying it that Tweek didn’t care for this news one bit.

"What?! How long will that take? I’m in a _rush_."

"Well, I dunno. A few days? It’s not a big deal. I mean you’ve waited this long to find God or whatever, surely you can wait a bit more.” He paused a bit, noted that Tweek was still unconvinced, and decided to drive home his point a little harder. “Alternatively, you could wander the dessert until you find the compound yourself?”

This earned a better reaction – in fact, it was precisely the reaction he had been aiming for in the first place.

He was starting to figure this guy out at last.

"No. No. Definitely not. Too many snakes. Alien abductions. Not on the agenda."

Craig smiled wryly and gestured casually back in the direction they came from.

"Yeah that’s what I thought. But there more bad news to come yet..." he paused for a moment, to build tension, and Tweek glared at him with bright green eyes.

"What’s that?"

"We still have to walk back."

 

…

 

They made it back to the town in record time and with no incident, although Tweek tripped over a small cactus in his hurry to get as far away from the (as yet unseen) snakes as possible. Irritation about having to stay longer was the first expression of emotion other than fidgety and non-specific fretfulness Craig had seen from him, and so Craig found it impossible to generate any decent conversation the whole way. Not that it mattered – the heat made it too difficult to think let alone speak. Craig just trudged along and squinted at the horizon, trying to spot the clouds which had hovered over the distant ranges yesterday morning.

When they finally returned to the pub, dusty and sweaty and tired, Craig walked Tweek straight through the bar and into the kitchen at the back, where Kenny or Butters would most likely be preparing dinner for the night.

The kitchen was empty. Tweek huffed and rubbed the sweat off his brow. A pot of peeled potatoes boiling on the stove spluttered, and steam started hissing under the rim of the lid

The hotel kitchen was small and cluttered, and by the door a stack of dated newspapers offered recounts of everything that had happened in this town since time itself began. The kitchen itself predated this hypothetical start point, however – the faded linoleum on the floor was curling in the corners with age, and the windows were glued shut with layer after layer of cracked white paint. Close to the ceiling, creaking wooden shelves curved under the weight of heavy pots and pans, and in the back a large and ancient refrigerator rattled away keeping its contents cool and fresh. The only recent fitting in the space was the stove and oven, glimmering in stainless steal and highly polished, and also a Macbook left open on the bench by the sink. Clearly someone had been in here recently – Butters still had Facebook open, so presumably it was he who had started making dinner then stopped, for reasons that were yet unknown.

Craig’s stomach grumbled loudly, and he realised that although his breakfast had been far from meagre, he was hungry. Not only that, but he was dehydrated, and now he was standing in the cool shady kitchen he was feeling a little light headed and sick. He wrenched open the fridge and groped around amongst Tupperware containers and cans of King Cola, and extracted a litre carton of fruit drink that had not yet been cracked open. The flavour was mango pineapple rush, although Craig suspected no mango or pineapple had been so much as near the stuff in the entire course of its existence. Drinking straight from the carton, he continued to rifle through the contents of the fridge. Tweek looked on with a faint expression of distaste on his sunburnt face.

"No clean glasses?" He asked. Craig shrugged and peeled the tinfoil off a mysterious bowl of something, which turned out to be apple cobbler from a few nights before. He was just about to swap out his drink for the dessert when a brisk clap around the ears distracted him and he fumbled the carton and the cobbler dish. The mango pineapple beverage fell to the ground with a thud, and spilled in a sugary orange pool all over the ground.

"What in the fuck do you reckon you’re doing?" Kenny, who was adept at creeping in unnoticed thanks to his small stature, didn’t look _totally_ pissed, but he did look a little bit mad. Suddenly feeling quite guilty at having been caught pilfering, Craig rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth in an effort to remove any tell-tale juice moustaches from the vicinity of his face.

"My bad," he said in apology, picking up the spilled carton and tiptoeing over the spreading puddle of fruit drink to drop the emptied carton into the sink. "We just got back from checking out his car and it’s hot as hell out"

"And what? You’re too good to use a glass these days?" Kenny stepped back, out of the puddle stickying the floor, and groped for a cloth on the bench just behind him.

"That’s what I said."

Tweek watched Craig rinse the carton, leaning against the table by Butters' laptop with his arms crossed and, Craig realised, looking much too tall and large to fit in such a cramped and chaotic kitchen. Kenny scoffed and dropped a tea towel onto the spill to sop it up.

"Yeah yeah. What about the car then? Is it back up and running?"

He gestured to Craig that he should probably take responsibility for wiping the floor, and sat down on the too-tall stool next to the back door. Tweek shook his head, and looked suitably irked about how ordeal.

"No. He couldn't figure out what was wrong. Some mechanic."

"Hey!" Craig thought that was a little bit rude, considering the effort he was making for this moody sunburned stranger, and he glared at him from where he was squatted, wiping up fruit drink to the best of his ability. "Fuck you. I'd like to see you do better."

Kenny ignored this, a shallow crease of consideration appearing between his eyebrows as he contemplated what the issue may be.

"Maybe it’s the sand? He mused aloud, and Craig considered telling him that of it was sand, he would have goddamned noticed from the outset. He wasn’t _stupid_ for fucks sake. "So what then? It’s still out there in the basin?"

"Mhmm. Craig said you might be able to tow it for me? Back to the township?"

Kenny’s eyebrows darted up, and he looked down at Craig in annoyance.

"Did he now?" He asked lightly, and Craig sighed, erecting himself and tossing the dripping tea towel with the drink carton in the sink.

"Come on man. Don’t be a dick. How am I supposed to fix it if it’s out there slowly rusting to dust? Besides, I’ll come with you - I gotta show you exactly where to drive."

Kenny had a deep and unexplained fear of driving off road into the Basin. Craig wasn’t sure what it was, exactly, that had happened to him out there, but whatever it was it was significant enough to make him obviously unhappy at the suggestion.

This only agitated Craig’s own frustration about the issue, and he tried to downplay the challenge it presented as much as possible.

Kenny sighed and shook his head.

"Fine, fine. But I won’t be able to go out until after lunch now. And you will _not_ come with me - Kevin has been waiting all morning for you to go and fix his stupid fuckin’ washing machine and he won’t stop riding my ass about it. You sort him out. He can show me where to go instead."

He nodded at Tweek, who straightened his back and pointed a finger at his own chest in shock.

"... Me?"

"Yes you."

"Washing machine?!" Craig was offended that Kenny would dare to even _suggest_ he do such a thing. Concerns about how to lug Tweek’s Sigma back into town fell quite suddenly onto the wayside. "What do you mean I’ve got to fix his washing machine? Do I look like a plumber to you?"

Kenny gave him a haughty look and folded his arms stubbornly across his chest.

"No, but someone has to. And besides, it’s not just Kevin’s washing machine, it’s everyone’s. I’ve had a ridiculous amount of complaints about home appliances all morning. Swear to God, people think I’m your babysitter and personal assistant or something - Kyle’s fridge has stopped running, and Bebe can’t work her washer, dryer or heat pump. I’m fucked if I know what’s going on around here but I don’t want to deal with it anymore."

Tweek coughed uncomfortably and jerked his head in the direction of Butter's computer on the table.

"Uh, is there any chance that could be related as well?"

All three pairs of eyes in the room swivelled to look at the screen in question, which had started to gutter like the video on a scratchy DVD. On the stovetop, the boiling pot of potatoes flowed over, the water hissing and turning to singed steam on the element, and with the acrid smell of sizzling water a wave of goose pimples swept up Craig’s arms.

The laptop screen turned black, and the water kept on burning, and when he looked at the others he was discomforted to see that while Kenny seemed plain puzzled, Tweek looked positively stricken. As though the dead screen was displaying something only he could see, and imparting wisdom that right now, in this moment, only he might know.

 

...

 

Craig was glad the day was finally over.

It took two hours to disassemble Kevin Stoley’s washing machine and put it back together again, and unsurprisingly in the process Craig couldn’t find a thing that was wrong. He mangled his left hand pretty thoroughly when he stopped by the library to look at Kyle Broflovski’s fridge, and after being reluctantly patched up to the best of Kyle’s abilities (so not very well at all) Craig only had partial mobility in his left hand. If it didn’t heal up in about a week… Well, e would probably have to travel out of the Basin and go to the State City hospital, but he tried not to think about that because the idea made a hot, uncomfortable bubble of dread rise in the back of his throat.

Deciding that home repairs were probably best left to those whom they directly affected, Craig headed back to his workshop at the petrol station only to find that two cars and a small motorcycle had been parked in the garage for inspection. Bizarrely enough, these particular vehicles seemed afflicted by the same unseen problem as Tweek’s, although the radio on one of them was still picking up faint signals.

 _Abnormal meteorological activity in the east of the salt plains today,_ the regional news report informed him as he sat in the passenger seat of Henrietta Biggle’s black Celica listening to the transmission. The car smelled like the bitter incense she burned in her stupid tourist occult shop down the road, and a glittering quartz crystal on a red string swayed from the rear-view mirror, but Craig found it very comfortable to finally sit down after a hellish afternoon and so he stayed there staring at the crystal swaying gently, his concentration trained on the weather report that seemed, as yet, unfounded in the basin skyline. _Pressure drops and static activity have been reported in the area surrounding the Radiant Basin and the town of Barbelo. Environmental services have issued a strong weather warning for the upcoming weekend, and recommend all Basin residents ensure their properties and contents are secured against string winds and possible lightning storms over the Basin rim. Nevertheless! We here at State City station are keeping our fingers crossed that the skies will stay clear for viewing the blood moon on Sunday night. As our listeners doubtless know_ -

Craig switched off the radio, thinking it was probably nothing just as it always had been in the past, and he wondered if anyone else in Barbelo had heard the report or if the phone and internet lines were fucking out too. He wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes, communications in the basin dropped below acceptable levels of dismal and into the vicinity of cataclysmic - it had happened once or twice during his habitation, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it happened again.

Craig sighed and dragged himself out of the car, just as Kenny and Tweek pulled up in Kenny’s Isuzu, Tweek’s dusty Mitsubishi in tow.

"I see you made it back finally," Craig told them as the vehicle stopped and clumsily, like he hadn’t stood for an hour or so (he hadn’t), Tweek stumbled out the passenger side into the dust.

"Yeah. Sorry we were longer than expected. We um..."

"We got lost," Kenny finished his sentence, jumping down from the vehicle cabin and slamming the door so forcibly that the pendant he had hung on the rear-view mirror, an occult looking rock bearing an engraving of a line with five short branches, swung in a wide arc and smacked against the windshield glass. His tone made it clear that he was somewhat shaken, although he would probably never admit to such a thing out loud.

We started down the fork toward the rim by mistake. We made it half-way to Brass Ridge before I realised the GPS was fucking up," he scratched his eyebrow thoughtfully and cast his eyes to the heavens in a way that made Craig sure he had heard about the weather encroaching as well. "Maybe it’s got to do with this atmosphere drama going down."

"Maybe. You’ve heard about it then?"

"Yeah. There was still some reception out in the desert. Although I think it's in everyone’s best interest not to mention this to anyone in town."

He gave Craig a significant look, and Craig understood immediately what that implied. If anyone else knew about the report, there would be chaos. Panic and packing and possibly a mass exodus. It had happened before in Basin history, and it would happen again, but it was probably more convenient for everyone right now if status ignorance was maintained and the threat of poor weather was allowed to pass unnoticed into history. After all, the chance of the weather _actually_ turning terrible was slim to none, and the panic that a scare would cause would probably encourage the townsfolk to run Kenny even more ragged than he was.

"I agree. But hey, look there." Craig thumbed behind himself to the vehicles parked in the garage. "His isn’t the only car that’s crapped out. Henrietta’s has as well, and I don’t know whose that is but it’s in perfect condition so I have no idea why the fucker won’t get up and go."

He pointed to the squareish green Avenger parked next to Henrietta’s sportscar, and Kenny informed him that that particular vehicle belonged to Red the cat lady. Craig could have guessed - there was a large bumper sticker on the rear which said _the more people I meet, the more I like my cat._

"And the motorbike?"

"That’s Stan’s. You don’t know him. He’s a friend of Kyle and me, but he only comes through town every once in a while."

"I see."

Craig fisted his hands on his hips and sighed, feeling far more tired than he had in a long time - like the heat and the dust today more than ever was finally starting to weary his bones. He might have stood there contemplating it all a moment longer, if he hadn’t been interrupted by Tweek who addressed him, in a way that might have come across as concerned - Craig wasn’t sure.

"What happened to your hand?"

Craig lifted the bruised and bandaged appendage and glanced at it. Since the incident, it had swollen to about twice its size and turned quite a glorious shade of blue-purple.

"I dropped a fridge on it," he reported honestly. "I think I split a knuckle or something, it hurts like a total bitch."

"Is that going to interfere with you fixing my car?"

Craig kicked himself, for thinking that Tweek’s diluted worry could have been related to the state of his own wellbeing. He had a good mind to inform him that yes, actually, it did, but Craig was oo tired to be shitty and instead he just allowed himself to be discreetly hurt. He probably deserved it for letting himself warm to him in the first place.

He shook his head and dropped his hand back by his side.

"No. Fortunately for you, I’m right handed."

"Doesn’t fixing a car require two hands?"

Craig wouldn’t know the textbook answer for that. He gave Tweek a filthy look and decided that while he wouldn’t pretend his injury would stop him fixing his car, he would _not_ be taking another look at it tonight.

"Would you just lay off me already? I’m doing the best I damned well can."

Kenny interrupted them, as though he sensed the tension building in the toasty evening air and wanted to defuse any arguments as soon as possible.

"Hey, it’s cool. I’m going back to the pub to check on dinner. Craig, you close up and park these two wherever. Tweek, come back with me and I'll introduce you to Kyle. He’s got access to all these sick nerdy records and books in the library which might have just the information you want to know."

Tweek gave Kenny a small, subtle smile that didn’t quite meet his guarded eyes. Craig had a sneaking suspicion that whatever information he was about to be provided with, Tweek didn’t actually care to know at all. Good manners, it seemed, where a real thorn in his side. 

"Sure. Okay. That sounds fine."

Craig shot the rudest gesture he could think of at Tweek’s back when he walked away, and fortunately for him neither him not Kenny glanced backwards to see it. Also fortunately, with regard to Craig’s need to express his frustrations in a non-destructive and non-confrontational manner, he managed to produce this gesture with the help of just one hand.

 

...

 

It was ten pm, and it was just getting dark. Craig was just finishing setting up his telescope and laptop when he was interrupted by a soft knocking on the caravan side.

"Hey."

"Woah! What the fuck! Way to startle me."

Tweek was standing a few feet behind him, mostly in shadow although the general details of his face were illuminated by the waxing moon overhead, and the salt-on-satin glitter of the stars in the sky.

"I thought I would find you here," Tweek told him, and Craig pressed a hand on his chest to calm himself down, because holy fuck in all the years he’s lived in the basin he has never been interrupted while working before.

He didn’t care for it at all.

"I live here," he responded, and if Tweek was put out by this reply he didn’t show it. Instead he sighed and slid his hands into his pockets, turning his face upward to the place where the horizon met the sky.

"Sorry. I meant to say I didn’t mean to interrupt. But I came to pick up my bags and stuff. There’s a room free in the pub tonight apparently. The tourists are out camping in the desert tonight."

Craig nodded - this was a usual Friday night occurrence. The weekly extra-terrestrial adventure tour bus (only one of the four basin tours available to tourists during the summer seasons,) usually arrived Thursdays for a day of library and archive research and shopping in the kitschy souvenir-slash-occult shops, and camped Fridays in the desert a few miles out by brass ridge. This meant that there were often rooms with no bookings on Friday night that would promptly be picked up by weekend busybodies first thing Saturday morning, and obviously Butters had done Tweek the favour of offering one of these hotel rooms to him. For some reason, this made Craig feel a little jealous. Was the cot on the floor of his caravan not good enough?

"Well, you know where it is. Down the back.”

He waved him away with his bandaged hand and dropped his ass down into the battered plastic deck chair he had dragged over for this exact purpose. Tweek however, did not make to move or anything. He lingered in place a moment longer, watching Craig shuffle papers with complicated numerical charts on them without saying anything, until Craig found himself feeling comfortable and had to ask what else it was he wanted.

"Are you going to come in for dinner?"

Craig shook his head and informed him he had eaten a half box of muesli bars from the gas station store before he had come over. After Tweek and Kenny went back to the Hotel, Craig had spent three more hours checking Henrietta’s car, and this had had the effect of lowering his mood to completely unacceptable levels. Aside from the crystals in her glove compartment, and the collected work of HP Lovecraft jammed under her seat to elevate it, the vehicle was in tip top shape. Completely fine. The only issue to speak of was that the goddamned thing simply would not go.

"I see," Tweek stood there silently for a moment longer, before asking a slightly less idiotic question. At least, in Craig’s opinion.

"What are you doing?"

"I’m looking at Mars. There's a transit tonight and I’ve never actually seen one," he adjusted the eyepiece on his telescope and double checked the co-ordinates scribbled on a sheet of lined refill paper. It was hard to see in the low light, but he had foolishly left his torch in the caravan and couldn’t be bothered getting up again to grab it.

Tweek looked at him as though he didn’t know what that was. Which he probably did not.

"A transit?" He repeated. Craig nodded.

"Yup. It’s like... when Phobos moves between Mars and Earth. They aren’t rare so it’s kind of dumb I’ve never seen one before. It would probably be better to see from Brass Ridge but unfortunately for me, I can’t get out there to see it."

Craig had always wanted to go to Bass Ridge to look at the stars again, but he hadn’t done it for ages. In fact, he was pretty sure the last time had been almost the same week he arrived. Maybe someday, when he felt kind of better about his life, he would make the effort to borrow Kenny’s pickup and go.

He would be so happy.

Still a little lost, Tweek transferred his weight onto his left leg and folded his arms across his chest.

"Phobos?"

"One of Mars’ moons," Craig turned to look at him fully, rather than from the corner of his eye, and saw that he had obviously just had a shower. "Do you want to know what that means astrologically as well? Because I am not the guy for that, I’m afraid."

Tweek shook his head and hooked a strand of hair back behind his ear.

"I know what it _means_ ," he said gently, "I just didn’t know what it _was_. If that makes sense."

It didn’t, but Craig didn’t bother to tell him. Impatient, he jerked his head in the direction of Tweek’s things.

"Stuff's there," he reminded him, and he adjusted his telescope to the correct angles. For a brief moment he regretted that he wasn’t at the university any more, using the huge and expensive observatory equipment to watch this totally average and unremarkable celestial event pass him by.

He was surprised when Tweek came and stood next to him, and he carried the smell of sand and fading sweat, his arms cradled loosely around his body and his eyes fixed on the waxing moon overhead.

"Isn’t it a blood moon on Sunday, too?" He observed. "I hear that kind of thing was a big deal. Or something."

"The Foundation out there have been talking about it for months, if that’s what you mean," Craig ignored how close he was standing and spared a quick glance through his eyepiece. Inside, he could see the glowing orb that was the planet Mars, but the image lacked the high power details present when he was using the university machine so many years past. He couldn’t even make out the ice caps with this little thing. "But they have a tendency to get worked up about any kind of cosmic phenomena they can find. If a fly lads on the telescope they would probably shit themselves in excitement about it." He sat back and stared at Tweek expectantly, wondering of he might leave soon or if he just planned to stand there all evening staring skywards. For some reason, the guy seemed just plain hypnotised by the lights blinking and glittering overhead. It wasn’t until he opened his mouth and said it aloud that Craig realised why.

"You know, I’ve always lived in a place where it was light even in the night-time. I hadn’t even realised there were this many stars."

With that, he sat down next to Craig on the dirt, and thoroughly confused by this intrusion Craig didn’t even tell him to go away. Instead, he heard himself saying

"You know, there’s more to a place like Barbelo than just the stars.”

“Yeah,” Tweek’s expression was hard to make out in the dim, but to Craig it almost looked conflicted. A little troubled. And tired. “I think I’ve kinda picked up on that. Everyone here is so friendly…”

He scratched the back of his neck, like he was starting to feel guilty about liking the place, and the people, and maybe he _was_. It was never a good idea to make friends or connections when one was on the way to join FTUC, because friends and connections always made it harder to decide to go. Craig’s heart leapt to see this, Tweek’s very first display of weakened resolve, and in a split second he made a decision which he would have plenty of time to regret later.

He decided to make an effort to help him out.

Maybe, if he could convince Tweek not to go, he would find respite from all the regrets that dogged him every time he remembered Clyde.

God, Craig hadn’t thought of Clyde in a long time.

“… If you don’t mind waiting another day for your car, I can take you around the town tomorrow and show you what else there is to see."

Tweek didn’t reject him down flat, which was a good sign. Craig could feel his cheeks warming in the cool night air, and the feeling of vulnerability that came with reaching out to a stranger was long forgotten and unfamiliar to him. If he said no, Craig was probably going to have to drive him to the Foundation himself in order to feel less naked again.

Tweek pulled his legs to his chest and wrapped his arms around them loosely instead. 

"Maybe...” he said, after a significant pause. “The librarian has already offered to show me the archives tomorrow, so I was thinking about sticking around for that anyway. You know he has all this stuff about the Foundation on hand he can show me? Stuff I couldn’t even find online. I mean, I had come out here thinking I was prepared, but when I was talking to Kenny on the drive to my car I realised... well."

He pulled a face, and Craig frowned.

"Well what? What were you prepared for?"

"Well, I don’t really know that much about the Foundation at all."

"Were you going to join?"

Tweek shook his head and laughed, but it wasn’t a particularly mirthful laugh - rather it seemed a little ashamed and self-depreciating. Like he was annoyed at himself and at the trajectory his life had recently taken.

Craig knew the feeling.

"No. No I wasn’t. It’s a little more stupid than that. I’m still not telling you."

Craig thought this was rather an unfair tease.

"Why not? I don’t know why you think I’m going to judge you. Nothing you could say could possibly be more embarrassing than the story of why _I’m_ here. It’s not like this place is attracts the kind of people who are happy with their lives."

Tweek turned his head to look at him, his expression swimming and unreadable despite his eyes, which were sharp and bright with the silver reflection of the moon in the sky. For a moment, Craig though he was going to give in. That he would relent and impart his secrets, and the thought made Craig feel warm and squirmy because he couldn’t remember the last time he had had an actual _personal_ conversation with someone. A chat about his past, and about their hopes for the future, and those rare moments of empathy that reminded him he wasn’t the only person in this world struggling with his life.

Instead, much to Craig’s disappointment, Tweek shrugged and pointed to the end of the telescope closest to his face.

"Don’t get distracted, man. You'll miss the transit."

Much to Craig’s frustration, he was correct.

 

...

 

 _And there was evening_ ,  _and there was morning_ \- the second day.


	4. PART ONE - CHAPTER THREE

Craig had a cold shower when he woke on Saturday morning, and even though it was six forty five (well ahead of his usual weekend schedule), he didn’t feel too bad when he stepped out and pulled a fresh pair of shorts and underwear, and changed out the bandage on his sore hand. The smell of coffee was emanating from the Hotel kitchen when he passed by, and he could hear Butters and Kenny having a lively debate over whether or not they could get away with not making a shopping run to the city over the weekend break.

"Besides," he heard Kenny complaining loudly, pots and pans clanging as he scrubbed them in the soapy industrial sink, "I don’t know if the Isuzu will make the trip. I had to tow that Tweek guy’s car back yesterday, and I doubt it’ll make it to the city without a dusting out."

"Aww Geeze Ken, that’s your solution to everything. If something ain’t quite right around here it the _sand_ that’s done it. Give it a dusting and that’s that. Maybe your pickup won’t be so inclined to get sand in it so often if you just hired a real mechanic to look at it!"

Craig smiled wryly and slunk past the kitchen door. It was kind of funny to hear Butters getting pissed off like that - he was usually so polite and soft spoken, and he would never, ever imply that Craig was no good at his post to his face. After all, that could possibly hurt Craig’s feelings, and God forbid he ever did a thing like that.

He pretended he hadn’t heard the exchange when, after depositing his towel and pyjamas back in his caravan, he returned to the kitchen back door and knocked lightly. Butters answered, and his cheeks were flushed in annoyance but otherwise he looked more or less the same as always. Craig craned his neck to see around past him, and spotted Kenny scouring pans and stacking them in shining silver piles on the drying rack.

"Hey," he greeted them both, and Butters must have been really angry because instead of his usual chipper _"Morning, Craig!"_ he just huffed, and stepped aside to let him through. Kenny however looked up from his dishes and waved.

"Go through. Continental breakfast is in the dining room, hot breakfast will be another half an hour. I think your buddy might still be asleep."

"Oh yeah?" Craig grabbed a banana from the bowl of fruit on the windowsill and noticed that their fruit supply was a little low. Perhaps he should suggest to Kenny that Butters was right, and it would be wise of him to go to State City and pick some stuff up before Monday. "What room number was that?"

"Eleven."

"Can I go up

"Sure."

Butters looked like he had something to say about that. He opened his mouth to scold Kenny, for such a flagrant disregard for their guest’s privacy, but clearly he thought better of it in the end and turned away to the bench, where he was half way through peeling a five kilo sack of potatoes.

"We need to hire a cook already. I’m sick and tired of peeling _fucking_ potatoes."

Kenny stared at his back in surprise, because in all the years the two had worked together he had obviously never been told _that,_ and Craig realised that this was probably an argument he didn’t want to get involved in. He made his way out of the kitchen as quickly as possible, and stopped only briefly at the bar to snag the spare key to room eleven. Just in case Tweek, like any reasonable person staying in a strange location, happened to have locked his bedroom door.

He ascended the stairs two at a time, his dad-loafers leaving dusty smudges in the faded red carpet. Upstairs, it was hot and dim, and the walls were lined with framed photographs and newspaper clippings that illustrated historical reports of alien activities in the area. Lots of pictures of circles in the sand in someone’s back yard. Discussions on whether or not the cat which gave birth to a two headed kitten seven years ago was the victim of some bizarre alien-feline cross breeding program. Craig had heard most of these stories through his years in the town, but because the only time he had previously been up here was two years ago he had forgotten that actual ink print records of these incidents existed. Ghosts of the strange reality he belonged to lingered in silver gelatine in these halls.

He was careful to check the numbers on each of the doors, stopping when he reached eleven at the far end of the landing and noting that Tweek had hung a DO NOT DISTURB flyer on his handle.

Craig was going to go ahead and disturb him anyway. He slotted the key into the lock and twisted it, the mechanism released with ease and confidently he made his way inside.

"Hey hey!”  He called to the occupant, closing the door  in his wake. “Wake up dude, do we still have plans?"

The room was small but tidy, illuminated by a large window which (unlike the windows in the kitchen) actually opened, let the early morning breeze eddy inside. Tweek’s bags were thrown haphazardly on the ratty armchair in the corner, and a large manila folder full of papers and photographs, as well as a small pocket copy of the New Testament, sat on the aged writing desk opposite the door. The bed was made, as if unslept in, and if he hadn’t been able to hear the sound of a tap running through the ensuite door he might have thought that the bedroom was deserted.

Craig edged closer to the ensuite, but rather than just marching in he had the restraint to rap lightly on the outside of the door.

He heard the tap shut off, and a small clatter, like someone had just knocked something over in surprise. The room was still for a moment, and from far away Craig could hear the sounds of the overnighter bus returning from Brass Ridge. Busses always made a terrible disturbance in the still of the local morning.

"... Who is it?"

Tweek sounded tentative, and Craig considered answering with an inhuman and terrifying scream, but he thought that was not only unkind but impractical. If he scared the boy to death in the morning, then he wouldn’t have anyone to hang out with in the afternoon. Although he did take a moment to forcibly remind himself that he shouldn’t become attached to this person, who (might) soon have a fixed car and (maybe) be able to fulfil his goals of disappearing into the Basin for good. 

Continuing to pretend like he didn’t care the fate of this unusual boy made him feel slightly less weird about the fact he did. And if he ended up leaving after all, then it wasn’t like Craig dint have the rest of his life to miss the comfort that came from just talking to someone, _anyone,_ rather than spending long days working on cars and elevating telescopes to very specific angles alone.

"It’s Craig," he replied. "We still on to go sightseeing?"

Admittedly, Tweek had given him a lukewarm confirmation that they would hang out, at best. He seemed more interested in spending time with Kyle at the library, but Craig had chosen to ignore this and after sitting and watching the shadow of Phobos pass over Mars for a little while, he had returned to the subject of spending some time together. Getting to know each other. It was embarrassing, but now the socio-emotional floodgates that had kept him comfortable in isolation were cracking open, his urge to hang around someone and waste time chatting about stupid inconsequential things was threatening to gush out of him and render him as vulnerable as he had been back when he first arrived.

He stepped back from the door a bit when Tweek cracked it open and peeked out, and his companion held it open an inch for a moment to ensure Craig really _was_ who he said he was before he dared to swing the door wide entirely. Craig observed that he was already fully clothed, in bland eans and a long white t-shirt, and that he had clearly only just finished showering. His face was not as red as it had been, although it was shiny clean and peeling a little on his nose and cheekbones, and his wet hair was turning the shoulders and neck of his tee transparent. The tooth brush clutched in his left hand, and the foam around his mouth, suggested he had been disturbed half way through brushing his teeth.

"... You were serious?"

Craig tried not to be offended by his surprise, and nodded.

"Yeah I was."

Tweek looked thoughtful for a moment, and the two of them stood there staring, sizing each other up. After a while, he turned away and jammed his toothbrush back into his mouth.

"Give me a second to finish up."

He sounded undignified, talking around the toothbrush, and it was quite endearing. Craig felt his affection for the guy grow. He leaned on the bathroom doorframe, Tweek ducking back in to spit and rinse his mouth, before dropping his tooth brush into a paper coffee cup he had set on the soap holder beside the shower.

"How’s my car coming?" He asked, glancing at Craig in the mirror and picking an old hairbrush up of the top of the toilet cistern. The bathroom was a small space, and he seemed comfortable making the most of every surface for toiletry storage.

"Its not," he told him honestly. "If you thought I got up at four am today to work on it, you were mistaken. It can wait."

Rather than earning what he thought would be an annoyed response or outburst, however, this made Tweek grin and shake his head, as though he was unsurprised to hear this news. As though this had fallen exactly in line with the kind of behaviour he had expected from someone like Craig. And this in itself was unsettling.

"You’re using my car to hold me hostage here, aren’t you?" He straightened up and brushed his wet hair back off his face. "Being hostage is something I’ve always been afraid of. But now it’s happening I can’t be mad about it. I guess... in a way, I’m kind of flattered?"

Craig, who found himself _very_ insulted by this insinuation, would have liked to respond to that. But humiliatingly enough he could not think of an appropriate comeback.

 

...

 

Although he would never admit it, Craig was sulking as they ate their cold cereal and luke-warm coffee breakfast. Hot food hadn’t materialised at the bar, possibly because the debate conducted earlier between Kenny and his employer had somehow degraded into a furious, full-scale argument, but Tweek seemed happy enough to concoct his own instant coffee and bran flakes, his mood fairly bright and his posture relatively relaxed - not at all like it had been the night he arrived.

As they left the pub, and Craig informed Tweek that they could go to the library first so he could check out the town history and Foundation archives as he had been invited to do, he tried to work out what it was about Tweek’s flippant accusations concerning Craig’s motives. Maybe it was as straightforward as Craig being angry, that a virtual stranger might suggest he knew him well enough to guess his intentions? He spent a decent amount of time trying to convince himself of this during breakfast, but regrettably met with little success. More likely (and oh, was he _loathe_ to admit it) Craig was pissed off that somehow, Tweek had realised that Craig was enjoying being around him. Tweek seemed to be operating under the impression that Craig _wanted_ him to stick around, and this was something which was becoming more and more true by the minute.

It was a vulnerable and unsettling feeling, like a soft breeze over the back of a hand that dangled off the edge of the mattress, or the sensation of an insect crawling down the neck of shirt when he was most relaxed, and least suspecting it. He recalled why it was he had worked so hard to remove himself from these kinds of friendships and ties.

"Do people live in those?" Tweek asked him, as they walked down streets lined with whitewashed little houses, and Craig said yes. Not everyone had the luxury of squatting in a caravan behind the Hotel.

The library was located at a three way intersection - the closest thing to a town square Barbelo could hope to have. On the opposite corner, the museum stood quietly, and on the _other_ opposite corner, the information centre, which was open twenty-four hours just in case any alien seekers came by at four am. This arrangement around a single central point meant that no tourists really needed to venture beyond the intersection and into what the locals called ‘Suburbia’, although of course they always did, ambling along the three or four paved roads in the whole area and taking photos of completely mundane small town details which were rendered completely fascinating by their isolated context. The bus stop, for example, or the dilapidated church which only ran services on Easter and Christmas. For some reason, church attendance had dropped significantly in the decades following the schism, which had first started between FTUC and the comparatively normal religious population of the townext to the library was the school, which also inexplicably received its fair share of tourist ogling on a regular basis. Tweek was unsurprisingly astonished to see the place, because although it was small and needed a paint job, there was no way the little timber building could be construed as anything else. He wanted to know what kind of a school it was, and why a place this with a population as small as this even necessitated a school in the first place, so Craig gave him the run down to clear it up.

"Bebe Stevens runs it. Three of the students there are her own children. There are maybe twenty or thirty students in total, between seven and sixteen years of age. Pretty much everyone here except me went there at one point because as you may have guessed, it’s the only school in the area."

"Her children go to the school? Dude… why is everyone here so _young_?" Tweek paused by the white picket fence that distinguished the school yard from the sandy pavement. "Where are the retirees and pensioners or whatever?"

"They stay at home mostly? I dunno. There are some older people around. I mean the guy who runs the church is about two hundred, but most of the people who do jobs here inherited them from their parents so when they took their place in the workforce the parents went back to their houses and did nothing. Me and Butters are the only ones who weren’t born here."

"Oh yeah?" Tweek cocked his head and looked at Craig from the corner of his eye. "Where you from?"

"Colorado."

He answered without even intending to, and regretted it immediately after. If there was one thing Craig absolutely _hated_ it was remembering Colorado.

"... Seriously?" Tweek looked surprised, and Craig nodded. He got that a lot _in_ Colorado too - people always seemed a little taken aback when he spoke, because he did not have any discernable accent.

“You look kind of like –“

"I was adopted," he clarified, "and now I’ve been adopted again. To here. Which is slightly less depressing I guess. We are here by the way." He jerked his head to the museum, the timber two story building next to the school, and Tweek’s eyes widened in surprise. Which Craig supposed was a reasonable response.

The Basin Library, while tasteful in most other aspects, did have a rather ostentatious frontage. It was made of timber, and thankfully had avoided the trite 'old west' rendering that many dessert towns seemed to capitalise on, but a few decades earlier during the height of UFO related tourism in the area, the whole thing had been painted with large green spacemen wearing souvenir t-shirts, who for some reason occupied themselves reading alien themed books and comics. Craig had always overheard Kyle complaining to Kenny about it, that he planned to have it painted some day, that when he went out there some mornings it was like he was being stared at through insectoid black eyes. But he never had gotten around to it and so, there they were, faded but indisputably ridiculous. Craig dared Tweek to bet his ass that tourists loved taking photos of that shit as well.

"Are you kidding?" Tweek pushed his hair off his face, to make sure he was seeing the place clearly. "That’s _horrifying_."

"If you’re afraid of little green men, this is not the place to be. Come on."

He ushered Tweek inside just as the first tour bus of the morning appeared on the horizon, gleaming silver in the baking sun.

The library was open, but it was always open early in the mornings. Kyle kept strange hours, breaking between one and three pm most days. Inside, it was cool and dim, and the smell of newsprint and books hung on the air. The reception was empty - a stack of folders on the desk and an outdated flag (only 13 stars) on the wall facing the door made the place seem like it had been empty like this for a long, long time. Craig tisked and banged his palm down flat on the silver bell on the countertop.

"Anyone here?" He called, and his voice echoed just a little, bouncing of the bare wooden walls.

"Hey?"

Kyle, a skinny and pale young man whose most notable feature was his rich crop of bright red hair, appeared from the door to the left of reception, a pencil behind his ear and a copy of the Basin Bugle tucked under his arm. When he saw Craig, an expression of distaste passed over his features. He sighed, pushing a few stray ringlets of hair off his brow.

"Oh. It’s you. How’s the hand?"

"It’s acceptable. But don’t sound too excited to see me. I’m just here with him today." Craig poked his thumb over his shoulder, towards Tweek, and Kyle seemed to brighten a little. The librarian pulled himself to his full height (which was respectable) and stepped aside to invite the two of them through the doorway.

"Oh right! Yeah! We met yesterday."

Tweek nodded, giving Kyle a polite smile and twitching his arm just a little, as if he was unsure if he should offer Kyle his hand. It seemed they had already done the shaking thing the day before, and it seemed that Tweek had been unaccustomed to it, so in the end, he did nothing.

The two of them followed Kyle through the side door.

The library was small - there wasn’t much point in having a huge library of books in a town where the population was comfortably less than 500. That said, it did contain a _lot_ of information about particular topics. If a person was looking for books about abductions, conspiracies, crop circles or new religious movements, Barbelo’s own dimly lit book depository was the best place to go. Certainly in the region, and maybe even in the entire state as a whole. Kyle was not an expert on these issues himself - he was trained as a lawyer, but also had a technical diploma in library and archive studies. His interest in the actual events he catalogued was mild, at best.

Helpfully enough, Kyle kept the books in order by alphabetical subject matterhe lack of broad categories in the place rendered decimal cataloguing irrelevant. Short shelves that rose to the height of Craig’s shoulder lined each side of the large back room, and at the rear an old wooden staircase lead to a much brighter and less musty reading room. Kyle had made an effort to have a few more windows installed on the top storey a few years before Craig had arrived, but Craig though that was wasted because in the entire downstairs area, only two conservatively sized windows threw shafts of light in to the gloom. Downstairs, in the basement, Craig knew he kept census records and other statistical data - death certificates, marriage records, and all that variety of dry and unexciting thing which would most likely be irrelevant to Tweek’s research. Craig took a seat in the only chair in the entire downstairs space, a well-worn and squashy armchair close to the door they had entered by, and turned his attention to the extraordinarily outdated map of Mars on the wall.

Kyle and Tweek busied themselves with muted discussion, and partway through he saw Tweek conjure a folded page from his back pocket. It looked like something ripped from a book - possibly the small copy of the New Testament Craig had spotted on his desk that morning. He felt a distinct sense of envy, that Tweek was turning to Kyle for answers to whatever weird questions he might have about the Foundation. Because while Kyle might have all the textbook solutions, and the capacity to find information if he didn’t have it immediately on hand, Craig was the one who actually had _feelings_ on the matter. Opinions and insights that Tweek would probably do well to ask about.

He picked at the bandage on his sore hand moodily, and after a while he lost interest in that too, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back against the wall behind him.

After about twenty minutes of sitting there, listening to soft voices and rustling papers, he fell asleep.

 

...

 

Tweek nudged him awake a little after ten, and all of the comfortable feelings he had had when he woke earlier that day quite suddenly and without warning disappeared. He felt like death down to his bones, and it took him a moment to remember where he was and what he was doing there. He could probably have done well to have another shower.

"You’ve been snoring for forty minutes." Kyle told him coolly, standing over his chair and looking down at him from behind his generously sized nose. Craig rubbed his face and groaned in misery. He had never felt so badly the sting of salt and dust in his eyes.

"Why did you let me go to sleep?" He asked, and Tweek looked a little guilty but also a little bit amused.

"Man, you went ahead and did it without asking," was the reply, "but the three of us have decided to go grab some coffee now. I suggested we wake you and see if you wanted to come."

Craig jerked his head up, having only just realised there were no longer just the three of them in the library, and stared at the stranger in blue jeans and a loose fitting t-shirt a few feet to the left of Kyle.

"... Who’s that?" He asked rudely, and the stranger smiled.

"Stan Marsh," he held out his hand to him, and Craig stared at it like he had never seen a palm before. He couldn’t put his finger on why, whether it was related to his freshly woken moodiness or the strange aura of confidence this stranger was radiating, but good _God_ did he dislike this person. Even more than he usually disliked people he had only just met.

"Stan Marsh who?"

"Uhh..." Stan realised Craig wasn’t shaking his hand, and awkwardly retracted it. "Well, I’m Randy’s son. Randy Marsh?"

Craig had a vague idea who Randy Marsh was - a local geologist who had moved out here in the eighties to study Brass Ridge and other geological points of interest, and descended into an uncontrollable spiral of alcoholism a few years ago. Craig had met him twice, both times at the hotel. Both times, he had been very nearly unconscious.

"... I've never heard of you."

Stan raised his eyebrows, and Kyle looked properly fucked off with his ignorance.

"He’s new," he informed Stan shortly, as though Craig wasn’t even in the vicinity. "He’s only been here a few months."

"I’ve been here two _years_ , Kyle. But whatever." Craig stood, and adjusted his shorts and t-shirt. He thought he would probably rather _not_ go to coffee with these strangers. In fact, he was rather warming to the idea that he go down to the garage and lie down in the dark under someone’s car until he died. "Good to meet you, Stan. Welcome to the Basin I guess."

Stan looked a little sheepish, as though he didn’t _really_ want to tell Craig he was born here. Educated here. Had lived here for nineteen years.

But he went ahead and told him anyway.

Craig scoffed and shrugged it off.

"Well like I said. I’ve never heard of you. Come on Tweek, we still have places to go."

He turned his face to his company, and uncomfortable Tweek nibbled at his thumbnail. He was clearly itching to argue, but at the sometime, he didn’t want to hurt Craig’s feelings.

"... I could really use a coffee, Craig."

"Well why don’t we go get it ourselves?"

Craig realised as he said it that he was sounding incredibly petulant, and probably not giving Tweek any good reasons not to ditch him in the middle of town. Kyle continued to look at him in distaste, and the stranger Stan just stood there looking awkward. How long had the three of them been chatting while he was asleep? How well acquainted were they all by now? A suddenly unfounded fear that Kyle might have said something to turn Tweek against him occurred to him – he barely had time to notice the negative thought before it was right in there, under his skin like a splinter, and it would linger at the back of his head giving him hell for the rest of his life.

God damn it all.

"... Fine," he relented eventually, outnumbered three against one. "Okay. Whatever. I don’t care."

Kyle told everyone they would be best to go to the diner on the other side of the town - the pub would be far too busy to handle four extras by now. Craig followed dutifully as the three others filed out, and it made him sick with jealously when he realised that Tweek and Kyle were still walking and chatting amiably.

He fucking hated it.

 

...

 

Chefs diner was only open between 9 and 5pm, but it had the convenience of being located not on the edge of the township, where tour busses skirted by on their way into the emptiness of the salt plains, but close to the only _real_ suburb in the region. As such, most of the clientele were locals, and Craig had to smile politely at everyone he passed when he walked in there. Even Kevin Stoley, who came up to him and asked if he could spare a few hours to check out his washer again.

"You wouldn’t believe it. The Television and internet is on the bnk as well."

Craig showed him his injured hand and said that thanks to Kyle and his fridge, that wouldn’t be possible. Kyle told him that if he wasn’t such a useless repairman, he wouldn’t have dropped the fridge on his own fucking hand, and Craig had to remind him somewhat forcibly.

"I’m an _astronomer!_ "

Stan observed that the two of them argued like they were married, something which made Kyle glower at him, and Tweek laughed.

Craig thought his relationship with Kyle was about average. He certainly had closer friends and closer enemies in the Basin.

They ordered some coffee and scones and sat by the windowThe seats might have been more impressive if the only view wasn’t the low houses opposite the diner, and then beyond them the dusty red land that seemed to stretch on into eternity. Tussock grass and Joshua trees adorned the back yards of the homes on this side of town. Only a few metres down the road the pavement turned back to sand and dust, compacted by the vehicles that had, over the years, followed this dirt road home.

Craig sat in silence for much of the conversation, listening to Tweek and Kyle talk about the profiles of people who often wandered off to join the Foundation, the fundamental tenants of its followers, and similar. Conversation then turned to Stan, and Craig found out he was engaged to the local museum operator Wendy Testaburger (a fact which Kyle seemed to have some misgivings about) but had been living out of the Basin in Los Angeles for four years now. Wendy did not know he was currently in town, and he asked everyone present at the table not to tell her he was around - he had only intended to come in for a day yesterday to see Kyle, but weirdly enough his motorbike had broken down partway to the centre of town.

"The Harley in the workshop."

Craig recalled the mysterious motorbike, belonging to the stranger Kenny had named yesterday.

"Yeah. Kenny told me the mechanic would fix it. But I haven’t seen him anywhere so far," he turned to Kyle in puzzlement, and a look of discomfort passed over Kyle’s face instantaneously. For what was possibly the first time in history, Craig sympathised with him. In fact he was pretty much certain he felt the same.

"Craig is the mechanic now." Kyle told him crisply. "Clyde left eighteen months ago."

Stan looked surprised to hear this.

"... Where did he go?"

"The compound." Craig answered tersely. And that was the end of that conversation.

The rest of the coffee passed more comfortably. Tweek didn’t talk much - he was too busy making the most of the bottomless filter refills to comment, although Craig did notice he became decidedly more twitchy as their talk went on. Kyle caught Stan up with discussions about the town, and Stan in return discussed the details of his thoroughly boring life in the big city. Every now and then, Craig felt a little bit as though the two of them were receding into their own private world of nostalgia and inside jokes, and he was uncomfortably aware that these to persons for whom he felt no particular care had something he himself hadn’t had forever. Something he couldn’t even remember how it felt to have - a meaningful emotional relationship with another person.

He interjected at any point in the conversation where he felt too uncomfortable.

"So why did you move to the city?" Craig asked eventually, having run out of questions to ask him about his bike, and where he had stayed the night (Room ten at the hotel - who would have known), and how it had been growing up in the town with Kyle. This question, unlike the others, did not garner a short and easy answer - Stan paused his conversation with his friend and frowned, and Craig noted he had the particular blue eyes of high school football captains Craig had known when he was younger. The exact kind of people Craig hated, and at the same time wanted to become.

"Well... isn’t it obvious?" he asked, a shallow crease appearing between his eyebrows. Tweek even ceased guzzling his coffee for a moment to listen in.

"Huh? What are we talking about?"

Stan ignored him, and scratched the side of his chin thoughtfully.

"I mean, _I_ left because I started feeling kind of... miserable here. Even when I was with Kyle and Wendy and my other friends. I don’t think a place like this is good for people, because it just doesn’t have... oh, I dunno. I guess I just wanted to go to a fast food place at four am on a Friday, and be enrolled in a _real_ college instead of studying via correspondence, and to buy my alcohol from a bottle shop instead of a petrol station or hotel bar."

He shrugged, as though he was unsure if he was expressing himself correctly, and Kyle looked on with a sadness that seemed almost sickening to the passive bystander.

"What’s so great about any of those things though? Aren’t they so... meaningless? Stressful? I mean all your _friends_ are here. Your family."

Stan looked suitably shamefaced, and Craig realised that this was probably an old argument between the two of them. Why would Stan send himself spiralling into the chaos of the outside world, when he could have just stayed right here?

And it was probably a world record day for annoying coincidences of opinion, because Craig felt himself agreeing with Kyle for the _second_ time that morning. He nodded and reached past Tweek for the coffee jug. His mug was low, and he wanted to look as casual as possible when he told him that he thought Kyle was right.

"The real world sucks." Craig informed him shortly. "I would have given anything to get out of there. And I did."

Stan’s brow creased even further, until it was scrunched like a rumpled bed sheet, and he looked an awful lot like he wanted to ask why Craig happened to hold this opinion.

But he didn’t say anything.

 

...

 

The group parted ways on the doorstep of the diner, and Craig was glad of it because frankly, he found the presence of Stan and Kyle depressing. When he checked his watch, he saw it was 12.30pm, and that the pair of them had already wasted half of his day. By this time, a few more tourists were milling about the dusty streets, taking pictures and looking out of place in sunglasses and backpacks and large straw hats. Tweek seemed quite excited about the idea of going down the left fork of the intersection, the little road locals unofficially called Main Street, and checking out the kitschy little shops down there.

Craig suspected it was either residual excitement from having learned new information about the Foundation and the town that birthed it, or the unholy amount of filter coffee he had just accepted into his system.

The Main Street shops consisted primarily of souvenir paraphernalia outlets and bookstores, the most interesting of which was by far Henrietta Biggle’s F _oramen Vermiis -_ a creepy looking occult store with blinded windows and a facade which would probably would have been quite impressive, had the sun not baked the black paint to greyish strips peeling off the salty old wood. Standing between the Alien areal photography store (which sold large framed prints of the Basin from above) and the closed down magazine distributors, it seemed to both draw customers and repel them simultaneously. People walked in and out all the time, if only to have a look and then leave again, and Henrietta probably did pretty well running the place. Well enough to drive an old but very well maintained Celica, anyway.

"What’s that place?" Was the first thing Tweek asked when they turned down Main Street, and  unsurprised Craig informed him it was the go-to shop for incense, crystals, and books about paranormal stuff that seemed to capture the interest of tourists. The kind who already thought the basin was full of weirdos, brainwashed cult-members, or Satanists anyway.

"You sound kinda annoyed by that," Tweek observed, and Craig shrugged like he didn’t care. Which he did not. If anyone asked his opinion on the matter (and no-one did) running shops like that only helped to make the perception of the Basin community a self-fulfilling prophecy. People came by, they walked inside Henrietta’s store for three minutes, and they left with the conviction that the only thing that happens in Barbelo is human sacrifice and alien worship - the exact conviction which had brought them out to these parts in the first place. Craig found it personally insulting.

"Well, call me fussy, but as a local resident I don’t really enjoy being ogled at by strangers because they think I belong to a weird religious sect or something. The way outsiders act towards people out here... it’s like we are animals in a zoo sometimes."

Tweek looked guilty momentarily, and Craig wondered if he was remembering whatever thoughts he had thought when the pair of them had first met.

"Well I think it’s cool," he said eventually, as the pair strolled past a public notice board covered in advertisements for 'abduction insurance'. "People come out here to learn about the place, and what other people believe about it. I think we should go in."

"What? Aren’t you afraid of being hexed or something?" Craig gave him an incredulous look. Tweek made a point of pretending he didn’t see it.

"Hexes don’t exist," he said, his voice suggesting that actually, he _was_ afraid of that, but he was pretending not to be for the sake of being nosey. "Come on."

And so dutifully, Craig followed him, rolling his eyes and wondering what delightfully horrendous 'mystery' Henrietta would have for them today. A photo of The Mothman?  Perhaps a neck tie belonging to a former Man In Black? Craig let Tweek do the honours and swing open the shop door - the silver pentagram hanging in the door window clinked against the glass when it swung closed, and Craig almost passed out when he walked inside because God, if it was hot out there in the desert then within the walls of _Foramen Verniis_ , it was arnace. The air was thick with incense, and from backroom Craig could hear a low dirge album playing. The blinds let in only skinny slivers of light, and almost every surface in the entire store was black. Black carpet, black wallpaper, black feather boa lopped around the black chandelier. The proprietor of the store, a voluminous figure with dyebox black hair and chalk-white Foundation, looked up from her magazine when they entered.  By the looks of the ash tray in front of her, she had already smoked a whole packet of cigarettes today. Tweek gave her a meek half-smile, and in an effort to avoid conversation with such an intimidating woman he made his way to the back of the shop, where all the books on Lucifer and La Vey and Alistair Crowley were kept.

"Oh, it you." Henrietta gave Craig a once-over, obviously displeased by his appearance, and laid the holder mounted with what may have been her fortieth smoke into the already overflowing ash tray. "Have you managed to fix my car yet? Not that I care. It’s not like I have to go anywhere or anything."

Craig shook his head and fingered a velvety purse, hanging from a black serpentine coat rack standing next to the counter.

"Can’t find what’s wrong," he said honestly. "But I’d suggest getting rid of the rock on the rear-view. That’s my professional opinion."

Henrietta’s eyes, which were a transparent and not particularly gothic blue, narrowed. She stared at Craig for a moment, assessing whether or not it was worth the effort top retort. In the end, she decided not. She scoffed, gave him a short and dismissive "Whatever," and went back to reading her magazine. The magazine, incidentally, was an out-dated copy of _Cosmopolitan_ , probably full of the exact kind of posers and conformists Henrietta had always been so vehemently been opposed to. He wondered briefly if she had picked the magazine because it was convenient, or because she actually cared about ‘The ten things he doesn’t want you to know, (but we are going to tell you anyway)”.

Craig didn’t actually give a shit. He turned away from her and her counter, which was made of glass and full to brimming with glittering jewellery and a few gilded and bejeweled knives, and sought Tweek amongst the shelves. Although the store was small, it was so crammed full of stuff that it became disconcertingly  easy to amongst corsetted mannequins and shelves full of skulls and herbs and mysterious objects that seemed sinister in the context Craig was seeing them. He found Tweek at the very back, skim reading a book pulled from the meagre shelf dedicated to white magic, Wicca, and Christianity.

"Whatcha got there?" Craig snuck up behind him, just to see if it would give him a fright. It did, and he almost knocked over a rack full of postcards, which seemed out of place in the rest of the store environment.

"Jesus Craig!" He slammed the book shut and raised it, as though he meant to give Craig a beating with the thing. "Jesus Christ!"

"You’re too tense," Craig insisted, prying the book from his hands and flipping it, to read the blurb. The book was an uninteresting volume called ‘The Gnostic Religion’. He did not know what that was, and nor did he care - he put it back on the shelf between History of the Cathars in medieval Europe' and 'Who was Yahweh - the history of the lesser God', and with a hand on Tweek’s arm to still his balance he stood on his tip toes, peering at the books on the uppermost shelf.

"There’s a book about the Branch Davidians here," he observed, wondering why Henrietta would have the cult books, the books on the subject which brought most of her clientele to her doorstep, stored on the highest shelf at the very back. Next to the books about dead Christian movements and white witchery. "Weren’t those the ones who committed suicide?"

"You’re thinking of Jonestown." Tweek told him. "Or Heaven’s Gate. Or actually, there are lots. But the Branch Davidians didn’t commit suicide. The ATF opened fire on them. “

“Well, did they die?”

“A few did, yeah.”

Craig hummed and stood down off his points.

“Are you some kind of expert on cults then? Is that why you came out here looking for the Foundation?”

Tweek’s lips quirked as reached up and slid a book about scientology off the top shelf. He shook his head, and dropped his eyees to the small summary centred on the back.

“No. I’m actually an architect.”

“An _architect_?”

Craig was certain there had never been one of those in the Basin before. But Tweek did not expound, and nor did Craig feel inclined to press for answers. For some reason, the idea of Tweek sitting in an office surrounded by drawing tools made him uneasy. It reminded him of the real world, the truth of Tweek’s origins in a family and in a home. Of the complexity of his life. His experiences. His worldview. It reminded Craig that he was _not_ just a mirage who walked out of the desert and suddenly became substance, and as such Craig could not keep him here indefinitely, wasting moments in local shops because Craig was miserable and he was lonely.

He sighed, and began perusing books on the 2016 zodiac. Utter bullshit, from an astronomical point of view. He looked up his monthly horoscope all the same, and was subject to that fleeting sense of wonder and unease which came from reading a horoscope that very nearly could have been accurate. It said

_Your lust for independence sometimes leaves you feeling alienated from the world. Your urge to resist the suggestions of others are not always in your best interests. Observe the intentions of those who care for you less critically, and endeavour to engage with people and yourself on a more emotional level._

He reminded himself that he would probably feel the precise same feelings if he had reading any other horoscope for today’s date, and dismissively closed the book, replacing it in the wrong spot on the shelf.

“Are you done looking then?” He asked his company, who had tucked the book about the Gnostic Religion under his arm and seemed to be considering doing the same with a book called _101 uses for classical philosophy in modernity_.

“Yup. Okay. I might grab these though,” he clutched both of the books against his chest and gave Craig a sheepish smile. “I mean, I may not get to read them, but I guess there’s no harm in trying?”

“Why would you buy them if you won’t read them?” Craig asked, but Tweek was already slipping past and loping down the shelves in the particular way he did – like he was not entirely sure yet how to pilot his legs.

Craig slunk after him, and hovered over his shoulder while he made payment at the counter. Henrietta seemed thoroughly unimpressed by both his appearance and his book choices, but she did not voice this aloud. Instead, she wrote down the title and price of each item, then told him the total aloud. He paid mostly in coins and dollar bills from his jeans pockets (and Henrietta _really_ seemed to hate that) and scooped his purchases up into his arms.

“I don’t suppose you want any books on aliens of anything?” Craig asked as they made their way out of the shop, and the black door with its peeling paint closed behind them. The alien information shoppe, specialising on UFO related figurines, magnets, books and information DVDs, was only a few metres further down the road. Tweek assured him he had plenty of those kinds of books already.

“You could borrow a few if  you wanted?” He offered, and while it was nice of him to do so Craig thought that he had had just about enough of aliens to last him the rest of his life. 

“If I change my mind,” he assured him, steering them back down the street in the general direction of the hotel, “You will definitely be the first guy to know.”

They were passing by the museum, with its glass cased community notice board and slightly rusted litter bin just outside, when in the distance, a small cloud of dust began to form on the road. As they walked forward, and the cloud of dust began to grow larger, Craig started to notice that other people milling about the centre had noticed the dust cloud too. It was too large for a tourists corolla, and it was too middle-of-the-afternoon for it to be a tour bus, and so with a distinct sense of curiosity that coloured his gestures he silenced Tweek’s polite musings about the local economy, and craned his neck to get a better glimpse of what it was.

As the shape drew closer, it became obvious.

The jeep came to a stop outside of the local Post Shop, parking between a small Corolla Craig knew belonged to Wendy Testaburger, and Jimmy Valmer’s white Basin Bugle delivery van which, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays also served as a postal service vehicle. The people who got out were very similar to the other persons standing around in the street staring in the sense that they were not locals, by any stretch of Craig’s imagination, but they were very _unlike_ the other persons standing around in the street in the sense that all of them, five in total, were dressed in what looked like ordinary white polo shirts and pressed white trousers, their heads shaved as bare and smooth as the reflective glass on their vehicle window. Craig knew instinctively who they were, before he could make the symbolic connections necessary to recognise them. The party had a strange demeanour, a strange sensation about the way they filed out of the car and walked in a tidy line down the road toward the intersection. Tourists stood and stared, and a couple took the time to snap a few photos. When Tweek inhaled and Craig thought he would ask what _that_ was about, Craig interjected, and told him.

“They are from the Foundation.” He watched as they walked past the museum on the corner, and the tourists standing on the footpath jumped out of their way as they passed. “Sometimes they come in to town to use the post office or to buy supplies. But usually it’s only one or two of them.”

“Do you recognise any?” Tweek asked. Craig shook his head.

“Never seen any of them before.”

The person at the back of the line, and Craig had no way to tell if they were a male or female or some spiritually dictated category in between, swayed a little out of the perfect row they made and Craig felt an unusual sense of foreboding rise like the flavour of metal in the back of his throat. The person lagged a little, and turned back, and when they craned their neck around t look backwards Craig almost stepped back in offence because whoever it was, they were looking right at him.

Or perhaps right at Tweek, who was much more startled by the look, and immediately drew closer against Craig’s side.

“… What are they here for?” He asked, and a thin waiver of fear was audible in the tone of his voice.

“No idea.”

The person who was looking right at them paused for a moment, and Craig wondered if he would have to send an unpleasant hand gesture their way, but after that moment had passed the cult members turned away, and made haste to catch up with the rest of the entourage. Tweek relaxed, and Craig muttered something disrespectful in an effort to shake the sensation of being violated off his skin.

They made fair time back to the hotel, and like much of the time they spent together thus far, they did not do much talking. But Craig suspected that for once, this was not on account of his reluctance to socialise. Rather, he suspected when he glanced at his companion and saw ghosts of worry in his gnawed lips and sunburn reddened cheeks, that Tweek was too busy trying to process his own thoughts.

He the urge to ask him what those thoughts might be.

 

…

 

It was evening, and Craig was eating a microwave meal in his caravan, thinking about whether or not it would be weird for him to go and see if Tweek was doing anything of interest at that exact moment in time. He had tried already, to remind himself that if he was, it was none of Craig’s business, and when that had failed he had tried too remind himself that he shouldn’t care. The problem with this, however, was that he _did_ care, and so in the end he had simply relented, and allowed himself to entertain ponderings about the nature of Tweek’s activities right now, this exact location in time and space.

He pushed a lump of something partially meaty around his bowl with his plastic fork, decided he didn’t actually like microwave curry, and tossed the remainder of his dinner in the black garbage bag he kept under his skink. When he bent down to peer through the small window over his kitchenette, he saw that the sun was just starting to lower itself over the horizon. The dusty ridge of mountains separating the earth from the sky seemed vague and undefined through the salty haze of the Basin air. Craig sighed and twisted his blinds shut. He grabbed a thin cardigan from the skinny chair at the end of his bed and tugged it on. Something in his bones told him it was going to be colder tonight than usual.

He made his way out of the caravan and into the hotel through the back door. The kitchen was empty, but judging by the kettle coming to a boil on the stovetop it had been occupied until a few minutes previous. Something appeared to be wrong with the refrigerator – the door was open and a large puddle spilling out onto the floor. Craig groaned, hoped he wouldn’t be asked to fix it, and moved onwards.

The bar was busy as usual when he passed through – Bebe and her children were sharing a meal by the window, and Stan and Wendy (she must have found out he was in town after all) were sitting together at the table he and Tweek had shared two nights before. Stan gave him a polite smile and he passed, which Craig returned with as much cool indifference as he could muster, and although he scanned the space for Kenny or Butters he couldn’t see them. So he had no one to ask if they had seen Tweek, since the two of them had parted ways a few hours previously.

“ _I might just go and check these out_.” He had said. _“Do you know anywhere that might be good for sitting down and being alone?”_

Craig knew plenty. He suggested one of his favourites, and then told Tweek that really, he should go to the workshop and try and fix some peoples cars. Although he would have been happy to show him the location if he needed guidance.

“ _Uhm, no. I think its okay. I don’t want to inconvenience you or anything._ ”

Craig wondered briefly if he might still be there, but then thought no, probably not. That had been at least seven hours ago, and nobody (least of all a listless character like Tweek) could have stayed sitting on one place reading about religious peculiarities for all that time.

He lingered for a moment in the entrance hall, close to the foot of the stairs, only to become suddenly and acutely aware of how pointless this whole endeavour was. How pointless his _life_ was. He wasn’t sure exactly, what about the dusty carpet and the silent foyer that made him so suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin. Nor did he understand what it was that made him suddenly feel out of place here, like he wanted to get in a car and drive away and never look back. Whatever it was, the feeling started in his tailbone and slunk up his spine – he wondered if Tweek would even want to see him, and so what if he did? The guy would probably be leaving the town soon anyway and he would never, ever look back. He would forget Craig, and Craig was powerless to make himself memorable, and ultimately it won’t matter if he catches Tweek tonight or not. In a week, everything would go back to the way it was before. And it would probably carry on that way indefinitely until he died. And then (as was the tradition in the Basin) he would be interred in the old graveyard behind the disused church, without a coffin so his body might quickly turn back to the salt and dust from which it originated.

Some day, he would be nothing more than cracked and sun bleached bones, and it wouldn’t even matter because in death there was no autonomy to care.

He swallowed the silent terror rising in his throat like bile, and thought he might be best to check Tweek’s room first. He did _intend_ to ascend the staircase, and knock tentatively on his hotel room door, and if he received no reply he intended to give up and go for a reflective evening wander instead. There was nothing like a stroll toward the deserted centre city after seven pm to make one aware of their own mortality.

Despite all these plans, however, Craig did not find himself heading upstairs at all. Instead, he found himself walking straight through the foyer into the parlour room where Kenny often held his movie screenings, and then down the far end next to the fireplace, where he knew there was access to the glass room, in the form of a rickety white painted door.

The glass room was a conservatory, where many hotel guests sometimes took breakfast on the small wicker table and chairs. The old fashioned radio under the window was never turned on, but it made a charming conversation piece. The plants in hanging baskets were not native to the region, Butters tended for them with kindly green fingers, and spider plants and birds of paradise and overflowing buckets of pansies reminded the travellers and the tourists who dropped by of their lush urban homes. Craig used to come here often, in the evenings, but he had slowly lost the habit over time. All the same, he rather liked the space and the greenness off it. It was, in the horticultural sense, utterly unique in the entire surrounding region. And there were always days in the transitional months of a new locals life where he missed the smell of loamy soil and green leaves, and the damp coolness in the air that plants exhaled.

And he was astonished to find that despite having been directed here many hours previously,  Tweek was still sitting in the darkening shadow of the far corner, pouring over books, with the single minded concentration of someone who had just emptied the several dirty coffee mugs from the bar, sitting in sticky rings on the tabletop.

“… You still here?” Craig switched the light on, and the true extent of Tweek’s research sprawl became evident. He had at least four books on the table next o his mugs, a holy bible and a large stack of newspapers taken from the hotel kitchen. A manila folder of files and papers, clippings and printouts from the internet, was opened on top of the booky tablescape, and Tweek, dressed in track pants and a tank top, was sitting hunched over his hoard of information like a toad squatting on a log. He jumped visibly when the light flickered into all the corners of the room, and the purple red of the evening through the windows became black like the print on the book pages. Craig could see his reflection from every angle in the inky panes of glass, and he thought he looked a lot more tired than he had thus far. A little more slouched and weary.

“Oh shit, it’s you.”

“Of course, why wouldn’t it be?” Craig folded his arms and tried his best to appear nonchalant. Like he had just wandered through here as he passed on an errand, rather than coming with the express purpose of stopping by.

Tweek looked a little peevish, and closed the book he was pouring over with finality.

“I’m glad you came,” he told Craig tiredly, changing the subject neatly as he did so. “I hate reading, really. I’m slow and it hurts my head to concentrate so hard. But if you didn’t come I probably would have sat here all night.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Craig asked him. Uneasy, Tweek craned his neck to glance over his shoulder, staring for a moment in silence at his own face reflected on the darkened window glass.

“I swear I can feel someone watching me,” he said. “And I was scared that whoever it was, or whatever it was, they would try and intercept me if I tried to leave this spot.”

This of course sounded like the mad ramblings of someone with paranoia. Once again bemused by the nature of this erson, Craig scoffed, pushed himself up from his spot leaning in the doorframe, and wandered close enough to read the titles of his books. Two of them were the historyooks he had picked up from Henrietta’s earlier. The others were, unsurprisingly, about UFOs. One of them was apparently about both, titled UFO CULTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST, and Craig was briefly surprised that such a title on such a niche topic existed.

“I think everyone on this entire town had better things to do than watch you. No offence.”

He sat down in the chair next to Tweek and laced his fingers on the table in front of him.

“Found out anything new or exciting yet?”

Tweek forced a curt smile, and nodded.

“Yes. I think so. Although I am a little confused about everything. I think I might need a few more days to process it. Which is stressful because, well…” he trailed off, brow furrowing so a shallow crease appeared between his eyebrows, and Craig wished with a sudden and intense ferocity that he would just _spit it out already,_ whatever it was. All the unsaid ends to the sentences and conversations he shouldn’t have started if he had no intention to finish them aloud.

“Well what?” He encouraged. And he wasn’t really expecting Tweek to reply.

“Well, I'm supposed to be at the Foundation by tomorrow evening. But now I've found out all this new stuff,” he nodded to the books in font of him, “I'm not entirely convinced I want to go any more.”

Admitting this out loud seemed to give him trouble. A shadow of anxiety passed over his features, and his posture hunched over the table suggested an exasperation Craig could only guess at. He watched with a confused sympathy as Tweek twisted a lock of hair around his thumb, and wondered if he should tell him that he was _glad_ his investigations had changed his mind. Really glad.

Although that might come across as unnecessary interference. 

He chewed the inside of his cheek, and glanced at the newspaper stack right next to Tweek's elbow. The date was 1957, the headline read OVERHEAD LIGHTS WARN NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON IS IMMINENT.

Even back then, rumours of the apocalypse were on the front of the Basin Bugle. It was a tradition as old as calcium in the water.

“Tweek," Craig knew he had to press his point with as much delicacy as he could muster. Although he doubted his capacity to muster all that much. "I think if you are doubting your decision to go to the compound, you should probably spend another few days thinking about it. If you are supposed to be there tomorrow, for whatever reason, I'm sure you will be welcomed the day after. Or the day after that. I mean… haven't you already waited this long for enlightenment? What's a few more days of your life to a God?”

Tweek considered this for a moment, his eyes fixed on the spread bible in front of him but not focusing, and Craig could feel the silent hum of his mind working like an unseen electric current in the air.

“… I guess.”

He didn’t look completely convinced. Craig spared a glance at the bible he stared at, and saw that the rice paper pages were opened to Genesis. Craig didn’t know enough about the bible to know what relation that had to his research.

“Seriously. If I was God, I wouldn’t give a fuck about you or what you did with your life," he cocked his head, trying to get Tweek to meet his eye. "If I wanted you to spend it getting to the Foundation as soon as possible, I probably would have put you in the area in the first place.”

Finally, this seemed to reassure him a little bit. He sighed, and his shoulders slumped, and he turned his eyes up to Craig as though he was hunting in his face for the answers his books couldn’t provide.

“Okay. You got me. I guess you're right.”

“Right,” Craig gave him a little smile, and leaned back in his chair so it creaked. He felt the hairs on the nape of his neck prickle in discomfort, and he wondered if it was from the slight chill that was stealing through the glass room, or if it was the uneasy sensation of being watched that was the culprit. Tweek had mentioned a sense of being watched before, hadn’t he? The bright lights in the glass room buzzed quietly, and Craig rubbed the back of his neck, dismissing his discomfort as having origin in his own head.

He checked their reflections in the window, to make sure the room was empty, and sure enough they were well and truly alone.

How bizarre, to be alone with a stranger in an empty, dusty corner of the world.

"If I do stay, how long do stay for? If I decide not to go, where do I go next? I can’t stay here forever, can I?"

Craig shrugged.

"It’s not so bad. Better than out there," he jerked his head back, to indicate the wider world and everyone and everything that had previously failed him. "It’s a good place to think about stuff and look at the stars. And nothing ever happens except for tourists so it’s good for people who don't like stress in their lives."

"Maybe…" Tweek sighed and closed the bible in front of him wearily. "I guess I need to think about it more? Maybe I will stay another night or two. Or maybe I will change my mind and decide to go tomorrow afternoon. As long as I get there before the eclipse it should be okay... ugh. I am so bad at making decisions. I just suck at them so much."

"Eclipse?" Craig was puzzled for a moment. "What does that have to do with anything?"

And then an idea occurred to him.

"Oh hey! When I need to think something over and make a decision, do you want to know what I do?”

Tweek's eyebrow arched, and he looked a little like he may have been able to guess, but might just err on the safe side and refrain for now.

“What?”

“I check out the stars. People have looked at the sky for answers for millennia. I don’t think there's any answers to be found out there, but I _do_ think that giant empty vacuums like space are really good mirrors for your headspace. They kind of… remind you of the things that are most important to you in _this_ world.”

This made Tweek smile, and he hooked a tendril of blond behind his ear.

“You think that will work?”

“Sure. There's a really great ridge out by the Basin Rim. Tourists go camp there to try spot UFOs. I was thinking about borrowing Kenny's car tomorrow and going out to watch the Blood Moon." He was sure to add a quick lie to disguise his enthusiasm for his own spark of brilliance. "It's in the exact opposite direction of the Foundation. If you want, you can come with me and we can camp for the evening. That way, you'll have space to think without being swayed by any of this stupid shit.” He patted the books on the table, and Tweek turned unsure green eyes onto Craig’s brown ones.

“You think it will help?”

“I know it will.”

If Craig could take Tweek to the Ridge, to the very, very edge of the infinite universe, then maybe he would be able to convince him he didn’t need to find God to see it.

   
...

 

 _And there was evening_ ,  _and there was morning_ \- the third day.


	5. PART TWO - CHAPTER FOUR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter is by natteregn, and can be found [here](http://spbigbang.org/art-galleries/spbb2016gallery?thumb_limitstart=40#!spbb2016_art_by_natteregn01_01)

The degree of difficulty involved in packing for an overnight camping expedition can often be directly related to the amount of telescopic and astronomical equipment one intends to bring along with them when they go. Unfortunately for Craig, he planned to bring a lot. It wasn't often he got the opportunity to travel to Brass Ridge. Since his arrival he had lacked not only the motivation to borrow a vehicle to get there, but sufficient company to come with him as well. However badly Craig might have wanted to go to what was reputed to be the best stargazing location in the region, he knew that it was never, _ever_ reasonable to venture into the desert overnight alone. 

When Tweek came out to his caravan at just past eleven am the next day, with his own tired looking backpack stuffed with instant coffee and a sleeping bag (borrowed from Kenny) hitched onto his back, Craig had only succeeded in packing a change of clothes and a large torch. The telescope pieces he had had littering his caravan three nights ago had apparently multiplied three or four times over, and seemingly out of nowhere stacks of charts and co-ordinates had appeared on his sink and on the end of his bed. Still in his pyjamas, Craig was wholly invested in trying to pick which ones were of the most importance. It was a busy sort of activity, and to an outsider it probably looked animated and quite esoteric - he had no right to be offended when Tweek poked his head through the open caravan door and made quite a clear and blasphemous statement of his surprise.

"Jesus Christ Craig! Is something wrong?"

Craig looked up from an eighteen month calendar he was consulting and almost told him to fuck off. All this organising and planning had put in a poor mood - he had more or less completely forgotten the reason he had planned to travel out to the Ridge in the first place, and really he wasn't inclined to explain what he was doing, or why he was quarter of an hour late to meet up with Tweek outside the hotel as they had planned the night before.

"Nothing is wrong," he replied tersely. "I just haven't finished packing yet."

He held up his injured left hand, as though this was some kind of an excuse. In all honestly though, the bruising and bandage had not impeded his time wasting and deliberating at all.

"What? Why? You don’t need two hands to pack a change of clothes!” Tweek didn’t fall for it. “What is all this junk anyway? You know I was worried you had bailed on me or something."

He gestured to the telescope bits, and the strange vaguely threatening looking scientific instruments cluttering Craig's bench space, and Craig bristled in irritation.

"This 'junk' is a fucking expensive telescope. I'm trying to work out what I will need to bring."

"Uh... binoculars?" Tweek's eyes fell on the dusty and disused pair of binoculars hanging on the hook next to Craig's door. "Food and a blanket maybe?"

Craig thought to himself that the boy was a little too mouthy for his own goddamned good. However when he checked his watch and realised how much delay his predicament has caused him, he decided that binoculars were just going to have to do. It wasn't like he _needed_ all these charts and stuff - he knew the format of the northern hemisphere better than he knew the geography of his own hands. The charts were simply a pleasant thing to have around, because they reminded him of the sense of purpose working in a real lab, surrounded by computers and simulations and the rustling of data on reams of A4 paper had had. It was really so much better than the aimless, sometimes powerless sensation of just sitting and looking and not being able to calculate or theorise about the things he was seeing before him.

Craig sighed and tossed the calendar down to the far end of his bed. He remembered he had forgotten to take his pill this morning, and slightly embarrassed but still quite pissed he reached for the canister and cracked the lid open while Tweek stood in his doorway looking on.

"Can you give me another ten minutes?" He asked. His stomach rumbled, and Tweek narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

"I suppose. Do you want me to grab you something to eat maybe?"

"Yeah. something from the fridge in the kitchen?"

A strange expression of discomfort passed over Tweek's face.

"I would rather not go in there," he reported. "Kenny and the other guy are still having a massive argument about something."

Craig was surprised to hear this - usually, if there was an argument that threatened to draw out longer than an afternoon, Kenny would terminate it by simply saying "fuck off Butters," or some derivative thereof, and Butters would be left to sit in his kitchen for the rest of the afternoon fuming and muttering things about 'finally fucking leaving this dusty godforsaken hellhole' under his breath. But of course, he never did. Had their conflict really been _that_ terrible?

"What kind of something?"

Tweek shrugged.

"I dunno. I could hear it from the dining room. Sounds like the water heater and fridge and stuff have stopped working and whatsisname is taking it personally."

"Butters?"

"Yeah," he chewed the inside of his cheek, and Craig sighed.

"That's not _that_ unusual," he assured him, just in case he was wondering. He didn't want Tweek to think that the appliances and cars and radios in the Basin had a habit of breaking down, but he would feel like a bit of a liar if he said that every single piece of modern technology worked perfectly at all times. Sand issues notwithstanding, there had always been reports of technical difficulties with radio broadcasts and interference with some white ware on occasion. But although Craig didn't say it, he was a little unnerved by the seemingly increasing frequency of this phenomenon. Particularly considering all this had taken place in the space of three days. Hopefully, it would pass just like the menacing but as yet unmaterialized threat of torrential rain and lightning. And no one would ever think of it again. "Things break down here sometimes. If you go to the museum, I think they classify it as low level Alien-related-phenomena."

"Really? I mean, I knew that. But I didn't know that was something that happened here."

Craig shook his head and placed his pill bottle carefully back where it belonged.

"It's one of those things we keep secret for the tourists who bother to come out and see it for themselves."

The corners of Tweek's mouth twitched upwards, as if he could tell that Craig was unconvinced of the extra-terrestrial origin of such incidents.

"Doubting Thomas," he observed, and Craig rolled his eyes.

"Go find me breakfast."

He started shifting papers and stacking them in some kind of order on his bed, and with a final huff of amusement Tweek left him, alone with his charts and the slightly less herculean task of concluding his packing.

 

...

 

They borrowed Kenny's vehicle for the ride out. Craig was glad he had already arranged this with Kenny the night before because when they stopped by the hotel dining room to snatch a few bottles of chilled water from the bar fridge, Craig could hear that his hosts really _were_ engaged in a altercation that transcended the limits of any that had come before.

“You have the keys?” Tweek asked him, as they stood in the car park in front of the hotel. Craig conjured them from his shorts pocket, metallic KISS keychain glinting in the sun, and jingled them to indicate how pleased he was with his forethought.

“Of course. Do you have any food?”

Tweek said he didn’t, but that didn’t matter. Craig figured it would be fine if they just stopped by the petrol station on their way into the desert, and grabbed a little gas stove and a few things to snack on. He was more in the mood for junk food and soda than he was for leftovers anyway.

“We can go see Scott on the way out,” he said, unlocking the cabin and tossing the keys to Tweek, their driver. “I’ll just tell Kenny to take the food money of my pay check.”

“Is that okay?”

“Sure. I mean it’s not like –“

He was going to say that he didn’t have anything much else to spend it on, but was rudely interrupted by someone calling his name. This was somewhat alarming - in almost eighteen months of his tenure in Barbelo, there had never been any reason for anyone to call out his name.

“What?”

He turned around, trying to spot the caller on the foootpath, and from the road the same person called to him again.

“Craig! Hey! It’s Craig right?”

“It’s Stan.”

Tweek recognised him first, pointing to the man approaching at a slow jog across the parking area, and Craig scowled.

“What could he possibly want?” He muttered to his company, and Tweek shrugged.

“His bike fixed?”

Craig had a few seconds to glare at Tweek, and then Stan was upon them. He was noticeably over-dressed for the weather, in jeans and a grey raglan which already had half-moons of sweat in the armpits, but he didn’t seem too worried to catch his breath upon arrival. Instead, he started talking at an incomprehensible pace. The only thing he said that Craig could make sense of was that he was looking for Butters. Or maybe he wanted some toast and butter. He couldn’t be sure.

“… Butters is in the hotel,” Craig said, once Stan had stopped shooting words out of his mouth. “Why did you want him? I didn’t catch a word of what you just said.”

Stan heaved a huge sigh and raked his hand through his hair in annoyance.

“I said, he needs to come quickly, there’s been a big whole _thing_ at the Post Shop down by Main Street, and he needs to give a report to Token and the deputy right away.”

“… What?”

The phrase ‘Big Whole Thing’ could refer to any kind of event imaginable.

“The Post Shop.” Stan was clearly frustrated by his ignorance. “The one he owns? There was like… I don’t even know how to describe it. A couple of cult guys came in and started talking to people mailing letters, like they were evangelists or whatever, and then Bebe told Kyle who told _me_ that one of them went full nuts and started beating on Father Maxi. And Ike who was working this morning had to throw a bale of newspapers at him and a window got broken and the sprinklers went off. Kyle is so stressed. He sent me to grab Butters while Ike gives _his_ statement to the police. Or something.”

“… A Disciple came to the post shop and started beating up the _priest?”_

Stan shrugged.

“That’s what I was told.”

“I thought the Foundation was non-violent?”

“Well, yeah. I dunno. It sounds like a fuckin’ circus to me, man. I’m just here to get Butters and take him to the police because Kyle is insistent someone press charges. I guess ‘cause he owns the broken window and stuff he has first priority.”

He rubbed the back of his neck in a boyish gesture of irritation, and Craig felt a little bit sorry for him. It seemed unfortunate that he had chosen to come back and see his friend this week, of all weeks. There had been more occurrences in Barbelo over the last four days than there had been in the two preceding years, total. 

“Jesus Christ. Okay. Well like I said. Butters is in the hotel. But be warned, him and Kenny are having a hell of an argument. Don’t get caught in the firing line.”

He turned away from Stan, and hitched himself up into the passenger seat of the Isuzu. Although the violent and inexplicable change in Foundation behaviour was sudden, Craig didn’t think it was particularly unexpected - Sects like FTUC were highly sensitive to events and circumstances that may not necessarily register as significant to an outsider. Strange weather patterns, for instance, or overhead lights. His stance was that it would be easier for everyone involved to just press the charges and move on, rather than question why such an incident had occurred in the first place.

Tweek, however, had other ideas.

“Stan, wait!”

Craig watched from inside the cabin as Tweek leaned across the hood of the vehicle, arm stretched out in urgency to the departing figure in jeans and a grey raglan shirt. “Wait a minute! I have a question.”

Stan paused, and gave him a look backwards over his shoulder.

“What?”

“Do you know… I mean, did Kyle tell you, what the Disciple was looking for?”

An unusual expression passed over Stan’s face.

“Looking for what? Why would he have been looking for anything? I figured it was just a religious argument or something. The victim was a fucking _priest_.”

Stan turned away and ascended the few shallow stairs to the hotel entrance. Tweek dropped his arm and lingered for a moment, watching after him. He looked a little uneasy, almost like he wanted to say something else, but when Craig leaned over to the driver’s side and bashed the horn, he jumped and the expression dissipated.

 _We don’t have all day._ He mouthed, and Tweek rolled his eyes.

He hopped into the driver’s side, took the keys, and soon he pair of them were heading out into the desert.

 

…

 

Craig read the map, not trusting Tweek to navigate their course through a desert that could become very unpleasant very quickly, should they find themselves lost in it. Though Craig had been to Brass Ridge only once, it had admittedly been a long time ago, and his memory of how to get there was limited. Add to that the lack of notable landmarks in the area, he eventually had to admit that even his superior navigation skills were of limited use to them, if they were of any use at all. 

"There won’t be any snakes where we are going?" Tweek asked him tentatively, about half way to their destination, and in that instant Craig knew that now they had been driving on empty dirt road for forty five minutes, and the town was no more than a dot on the horizon behind them, Tweek was thinking about their fates if the car was to break down like his did and they had to walk back. Craig didn't see the point in lying to him, but he did point out that because the car they were in was a Ute, and because they had had the initiative to bring bedding along for the ride, they could simply camphere they were on the back of the vehicle and wait for assistance to arrive. If they weren't back by tomorrow evening, Scott Malkinson had been given instructions to send out a search party for them. Snakes would be unlikely to make the effort to reach them if they were high up on a pickup trailer. Right?

This only seemed to reassure him a little bit, because he fell silent and didn't say much else for the rest of the trip. Craig wondered if he was regretting saying yes to coming - maybe he wouldn't have agreed if he had thought more about the dangers? That said, the journey wasn’t actually that dangerous at all - tourists did it very nearly bi-weekly! And no one had died on a Basin tour trip yet.

Whether Tweek was starting to have misgivings or not, the day stretched on. There was nothing to occupy the senses the reassuring sound of the engine humming and the shimmering heat of the sun warping the dusty road ahead of them. The bad weather predicted by the Bugle and the radio forecast beaming across the basin two days prior had not materialised. Craig entertained himself by wondering, briefly, why it was that this particular car was still working so efficiently when every other vehicle in Barbelo had been breaking down. His thoughts did not linger on this for long, and soon he found himself hypnotised to thoughtless calm by the strange pendant that swung on Kenny's rear-view, and the blurry view through the windscreen ahead. At the foot of the sky, the huge rim of the Basin grew closer and more looming, and unlike the red of the desert the cliffs that surrounded the crater were dark brown and burned looking, thanks to the distance between them and the car. After driving for one hour, Craig informed Tweek that they were now over half way between the town and the edge of the basin. Their destination was only another twenty minutes drive away. 

Tweek glanced at him sideways, from behind his sunglasses, and although he didn't say anything that indicated interest or comprehension of this information, he nodded. Craig was left alone again with only the noise his own thoughts were making inside his head. Distant memories drifted to the surface, then ebbed away again on the rush of cool air expelled from the air conditioner going full blast. He thought about how empty the daytime sky was, the stars blinded by the intensity of the sun, and he thought about long drives on busy highways, with the windows down and the radio playing rock fm full volume. He remembered winter, almost out of nowhere - how it had felt to walk through dusty snow - and as soon as he remembered that he had to tell himself to stop. They were almost at the Ridge. Emerging out of the darker backdrop of the rim he could see the stony outcrop, and the faint haze of salt and dust that obscured it from full view.

When they arrived, and Tweek pulled up into the compacted parking zone only a few metres away from the base, Craig couldn't really remember what it had been he had been thinking about.

 

...

 

Brass Ridge was widely touted as being by far the most interesting feature of the Basin geography, most particularly because by all means, it shouldn't really be there at all. Although the history of the Radiant Basin formation was long and probably very boring, Craig had always gotten the impression that it was not particularly unusual. Most likely it had to do with tectonics and water migration, the result of which was a large and completely flat saline pit which extended several hundred miles in each direction. How a ridge the size of the a high rise building got to be there, however, was a mystery - geologists from all over had visited the ridge during the eighties and nineties in an effort to provide an answer , but their findings had been vague and inconclusive and so interest had waned with the passing decades. Amateur UFO fanatics always took great pleasure in marching into the hotel after their camping trip to the area, exclaiming that they had finally figured it out, but tended to turn slightly bitter when some Basin local or another took a moment to inform them that the idea of the Ridge being some kind of meteor was not only unoriginal, but also improbable and inconsistent with the composition of the rock in any case. Craig was undecided, whether or not he thought Tweek would be the kind of person inclined to ask this elementary question, and when he made it out of the vehicle cabin he got his answer. Conveniently enough, he didn't even need to ask.

"Wow. That’s disappointing. It doesn't look like a meteor to me at all."

Craig scoffed and assured him that that was mostly on account of the fact that it was not.

"It just a rock," he said, leaning over the edge of the Isuzu trailer and lugging his bag of stuff out. Kenny had been sure to provide them with two large logs and some kindling from the hotel fireplace, and in a discrete gesture of self preservation, Craig had neglected to include them in his own pack - his companion looked significantly stronger than he himself felt, and so when he pulled Tweek's pack out of the trailer he made sure to pass the plastic bag of wood along with it. "I don't know why people try so hard to make it out like a mystery. I mean... if it’s there, it’s there. There’s no point arguing the facts. You aren’t going to need that, by the way."

He pointed to the grey hoodie Tweek had brought with him out of the vehicle cabin, and Tweek frowned in consideration before realising Craig was right, and tossing it back into the back seat. He held out his hand to receive his backpack and the logs instead. 

"What?"

Craig repeated himself, and wearing a most peculiar expression on his face Tweek sighed.

"I don't get you Craig."

Craig arched his eyebrows and checked his kit, to make sure he had brought a lighter and a few other important survival tools.

"What's to get?"

"You're so black and white. It's kind of a downer honestly."

"Yeah, I know."

Craig wondered how Tweek could think he didn't know that - he was, after all, the one stuck inside the confides of his own head.

"I just don't see the point of making something mystical and magic out of something that's not," he insisted, and Tweek locked the car door out of habit rather than because he felt someone might break in and steal the car. There was probably not another human soul for _miles_. "A rock is a rock. The specifics of how it got here doesn't matter, because the fact is its here now and I suspect its origins are as boring and mundane as the origins of the Basin itself. I mean look at it." He stood at the base of Brass Ridge, about ten feet back from the craggy rocky path extending upwards to the top, and at the back of his mind he was thankful that he hadn't decided to lug a seven kilo telescope up with him because he would probably have dropped dead before he reached the crest.

Tweek sighed again, and tugging an elastic band from around his wrist he pulled his hair back into a slightly grubby looking topknot.

"I need to wash my hair when I get home," he thought aloud. And then he paused for a moment, ands frozen part way in the act of looping his hair up. His brows furrowed as though he was shocked that such an idea had even crossed his mind.

"... What?" Craig asked him, and Tweek dropped his hands in puzzlement. His eyes remained obscured by the sunglasses resting on his face, but Craig thought he could see a flicker of something strange and excited moving behind them.

"I just thought about what I will do when I get home," he replied.

Craig couldn't figure out what the significance of this was. Deciding he didn't care, he coughed and jerked his head in the direction of the path.

"Uh, okay? That's cool and all, but we should probably go now if we want to get to the top before nightfall."

He inched towards the bottom of the trail, but Tweek shook his head and waved his hands.

"No, Craig, you don't understand. I just thought about _going home_."

"Right. Okay. And I’m currently thinking about going _up_. Come on."

He turned on his heel  and started upwards, leaving Tweek to make a loud sound of alarm and scramble after him, leaping onto the path and almost loosing his balance on a skid of tumbling rocks.

He seemed a lot more cheerful as they ascended, and Craig caught him several times lagging, turning away from the path they were on and looking out in wonder over the desert beyond.

 

...

 

Craig passed Tweek the binoculars and directed him to look to the east, even though the moon was so bloated that night it made the meagre selection of equipment he brought with him superfluous.

“I don’t like the colour,” Tweek told him, without bothering to lift the binoculars to his face. “Why is it like that?”

“Well, usually, the light from the sun hits the surface of the moon and reflects back without any interruptions. But tonight, the Earth got in the way and the light has to filter through the planet atmosphere so it looks red. It's pretty simple.”

“Hmm…” Tweek screwed up his nose and placed the binoculars down carefully on the ground, next to the spill of gear the pair of them had pulled out of their bags. “Well, whatever. I still think it’s fucking creepy.”

Craig rolled his eyes. He hadn’t really expected someone like Tweek to understand.

“Fine.” He cocked his head in the direction of the west instead. “Look at the stars then if you're gunna be a baby about it.”

He picked his binoculars back up and wound the neck strap around the middle, before slipping them back into the bottom of his bag. Beside him, Tweek shuffled and huffed, trying to make himself comfortable sitting with his back against the jagged protuberance of rock they had chosen as their camp site. The thin windbreaker he was wearing made a peculiar noise as he moved, and reminded Craig of the sound of a wet umbrella being opened and closed – a noise he hadn’t heard for some time.

“I still know its _there_ ,” Tweek complained, looking down into his backpack to busy himself with something Craig couldn’t guess at. “Being all… menacing.”

“It isn’t about to drop out of the sky and kill us all.” Craig insisted, and Tweek raised his eyes to look at him as though it was kind of cute, how naïve he was being.

“That’s not what I've heard,” He replied lightly, producing the same manila folder Craig had seen on his desk the day before. He laid the folder down onto his lap and finally, taking care not to look directly at the moon, he turned his face upwards and his attentions to the skies.

Still there was no sign of poor weather encroaching. Not even a single cloud suggested that there may be rain on the way. For this, Craig was glad, because from the ridge the firmament looked more than other worldly, like something from a whole separate universe. Unusual lunar event notwithstanding, stars spilled across the sky thickly in white clusters like sugar on a black tabletop. Everything in the arching cathedral of space glowed as spectral and silent as the ghosts of the resting desert. The silence was nearly overwhelming, and so was the vertigo of standing and seeing noting but an infinite flatness spreading into eternity beyond. Craig didn’t remember the Ridge being like this – but then he hadn’t been here for some time. The last time he had came here, he had been with others. A large group of them, all wearing caps and carrying cameras and chattering in a way that made even the empty space seem like it was full of life and people. And Clyde…

“It’s so quiet out here,” he said, mostly to himself. The lack of animal sounds, or the wind on the window pane, or the hum of his mini refrigerator under his sink made him feel quite lonely. Even afraid. 

“Did you live in a big city before you moved here?” Tweek asked. Craig shrugged, adjusting his hand bandage, because even though conversation filled the silence, he wasn’t altogether sure he wanted to talk about it.

“Kinda. A small town in the mountains. I went to college in Boulder though.”

“That’s right. You're from Colorado.”

Craig hitched his shoulder again, in the most half-hearted confirmation possible, and Tweek turned to look at him thoughtfully.

“How did you end up here?”

Craig knew in a way he couldn’t explain that Tweek didn't mean it in the usual sense. The this-happened-then-this-happened chronological recount of his earthly days. He meant it as in what had happened in his head and in his heart that meant that now at age twentyhe was living in a town with no significant population doing a job he never trained for, with absolutely no motivation to leave. What were his goals in life, and when did they leave him? What was going through his mind the morning Craig woke up in Colorado and decided he wanted to leave his only home?

“… I don’t know,” he replied, as honestly as possible. “I came to see a friend of mine and he left and I stayed behind. I've spent every day for the last two years trying to figure out why. How did _you_ end up here?”

Talking about himself always made Craig feel stupid. Like a child. Although there was no reason for it, he was embarrassed by the things he had done in his life, and he was far more interested in Tweek's biography besides.

The other boy shrugged, grip tightening on the edges of his skinny brown folder he was holding

“I don’t know anymore either," he said. "I thought I did, but it turns out I don’t. So after what feels like my entire life I have to start over again.”

"Start over again?"

"My life. My goals. That kind of thing."

He paused in thought, and Craig found himself seized by a sudden and inexplicable urge to reach out and touch him. Just to make sure he was real. He suddenly wasn't very sure he had ever _met_ a real person before, even though he knew in his head that he had. In that second, Tweek just looked far more real than the rest of the scenery around him, or the memory of faces and voices Craig had known in the past.

Craig thought he saw him shiver even though not so much as a whisper of a breeze was passing over them.

While he wrestled with this strange shift in perception, and the jarring sense of unreality that accompanied it, Tweek pressed his lips together and looked back up to the moon, his attention captured by the deep red glow bathing the craters and scars on the surface. He ceased fiddling with the edges of his folder so he could pick at his hands instead. His fingers, with bitten nails and bony knuckles, had frayed the corners away almost to nothing. Left them bucked and dog-eared with sympathy for his worries. Craig wondered briefly what secrets might possibly be contained therein. It was strange, but despite having spent nearly every waking moment of his adult life thinking about space and looking at space and examining all the fleeting details of the sky, Craig did not feel particularly compelled to look upward right now. There were more interesting things to examine - the way the flames from the fire pit made shadows twist and shiver on the rocks, and the way that Tweek's face looked far more sharply contoured in firelight, his cheekbones and the shallows under his eyes suddenly overflowing with darkness and heat.

The air they breathed was dry and dusty, and Craig could taste salt on his lips. 

At the back of his mind, he thought he could understand why it was the tourists came out to this place after all. Even though it wasn't that different a view from the one in the town, there was something obscurely mystical about the process of driving out here, and being in a space of such isolation with sleeping bags and strangers. For the inexperienced, hunting through co-ordinates and square maps of space for unusual sightings may have seemed like a unfamiliar and ancient magic, and in the darkness of the middle of nowhere it was easier to spot details lost in urban centres - the faintest specs of light became visible, even the slant and spread of the milky way, and the winking lights of celestial bodies sometimes looked like they were in motion across the cosmos. If Craig was feeling a little more inclined to fantasies or daydreams, he could have almost believed that somewhere out there a beacon from foreign creatures was moving, flying swiftly and silently through incomprehensible gaps of void toward the earth.

"... Why did you _think_ you wanted to come here?"

He settled on, eventually.

He had asked this question of him so many times he didn't really expect to get an answer. He was surprised when his company, rather than negating his question, heaved a loud sigh and passed him the tatty folder in his hands. The contents were just as crumpled and folded as the card itself.

Puzzled, Craig opened the folder and started sifting through clippings and emails and other correspondence which probably contained all kinds of explanations about Tweek’s purpose.

"... Did you want me to read all of this?"

Tweek shook his head, and leaned past Craig to rifle through the papers for a particular page - a photocopy of something, a flyer like the kind that protestors handed out at rally's, or (how appropriate,) apocalyptic religious groups passed out to people on street corners.

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE RAPTURE? The flyer said, in large grey letters at the top of the page. US NEITHER

"I found this in a library book in the Prévost public library in 2013." He explained, as if Craig was supposed to know where that was and why it was significant. "It freaked me out a little, because I don't know about you but I don't really _like_ thinking about the end of the world. It kind of… freaks me out?" He peeled the sheet of paper out from between a receipt for petrol and a handwritten list of book titles that Craig wondered if he ever got to read. "It seemed weird to me, because Prévost is small, and a long way away, and I have no idea how something like that ended up there. It seemed to me like a sign?"

"A sign of what?"

Tweek looked appropriately sheepish. It was a familiar look - Craig had encountered it a few times throughout the course of his life, and usually it appeared on people who believed something with all their heart but worried that someone was going to make fun of them if they admitted it out loud.

"The end times? Maybe? I don’t know, it sounds so dumb but I just thought it was weird how somehow a piece of paper printed here, distributed in the USA and more than likely destined to end up in the garbage made it thousands of miles north and ended up between the covers of the exact book I was looking at in the library on that day. And it was _me_ who found the thing. Not anyone else. _Me_."

Craig coked his eyebrow, his interest piqued by the detail that may possibly have been irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.

"What book was it?" he asked. Tweek's expression shifted to one of annoyance and disbelief.

"I don't remember that!"

"Oh."

Craig pinched the photocopy out of his hand, and decided he may as well give it a read.

_The Foundation for the Propagation of Transuniversial Consciousness issues this invitation for you to join us, in our quest to unify within the divine light of the true God._

_If the world were to end today, how sure are you that you will live eternally?_

_We today live in a world of darkness, far away from the light of the highest plane of heaven. Nuclear holocaust, pestilence, and starvation are standing on our doorstep, and the earth itself is crumbling beneath our feet. When we die, our flesh must also die, and our souls will become imprisoned in this sinful universal plane._

_How can we, simple men and women of the dark earth, liberate ourselves from this material prison in time for the end days?_

_Spiritual perfection takes time and effort, and we only have limited space in our lifetimes to find it. We must prevent the end of ages at all costs. We must placate the cruel demon who rules this universe and imprisons us, in order to make time to chase the holy sparks which benevolently guide us through the illusionary medium of time and space. On this day we extend invitations to you to join us. If you feel willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of us all, we can guarantee you salvation instantaneously. Feel free to get in touch with us - contact information can be found on rear of page._

Craig read it twice, before deciding that it was all gibberish, and stating this opinion out loud.

"The Foundation is insane, Tweek. Everyone with half a brain knows it. Even Kevin Stoley." He passed the paper back. "Besides, it’s a bit jargony don't you think?"

Tweek blinked at him, and glanced down at the flyer in his hand.

"Not really?"

"Really really. People like this, they invent long words and complicated ideologies in order to convince people they know something they don't."

"Craig. Dude. It’s really not complicated at all."

Clearly a little peevish, he snatched the flyer back off him and shuffled around for another in his file. This one was a chart, drawn messily on lined pad. It had labels in the same scratchy caps only hand that covered everything else in the folder. Tweek's hand, more than likely. Squarish and almost illegible.

"The Foundation is a group of people who want to stop Armageddon," he said, pressing the new piece of paper into Craig's hand. "If the world ends, that means they will be trapped in _this_ universe for all eternity, with no chance at an extended spiritual life, or afterlife, or whatever you want to call it in a higher plane of existence. A _parallel_ universe."

"That seems a little unchristian."

"Well, yeah. Mostly because to them, the Christian God is ignorant and nasty and generally unpleasant. They want to unite with the _true_ God figure, who exists beyond the plane of our reality. So they basically spend their lives contemplating the immaterial and looking for messages from beyond space."

"... Says here 'Aliens'."

Craig pointed to the only word on the diagram he could read - it was attached to an arrow, which seemed to indicate that whatever 'aliens' were supposed to be, they were able to transgress all eight circles of whatever it was Tweek had haphazardly sketched in black biro. Tweek nodded and pointed to the centre of the diagram.

"Here's the Big God. The point of creation. Each circle around this point is a separate universal plane. Each one is created by a god who is lesser and lesser than the one who preceded it. And here's us, in the material world," He pointed to the outermost circle. "Foundation Disciples hate the material world, but have to stay here until they find a means to access higher planes. And so they concern themselves utmost with fending off the apocalypse, which isn't like revelations so much. It's more like a reversal of Creation?"

"Okay... and how are they supposed to stop the apocalypse? I mean, if Genesis started reversing right now, I don't think they could do much it."

"Well, how familiar are you with the old testament?"

"Not very."

"How familiar are you with the _new_ testament?"

"Not very."

"... Do you know anything about economic exchange?"

Craig thought he could figure that one out.

"You make a payment, and you get a service back."

"Exactly."

"..." Craig was lost. He glanced down at the manila folder, with its creases and its pen smudges and the little tears at the corners where the card was bent.

"They pay something?" He thought aloud. "What do they pay? How do they know when they need to?"

"The messengers," Tweek replied, "the overhead lights."

He pointed to the sky.

"The UFOS come and assure the Foundation they are right. They come here because this particular area has what they call a 'high trans-universal frequency'. The separation between our universe and others is thinner. It’s like… The basin works as a prism, splitting the different planes of reality and making them visible and accessible through various rituals and practices."

"How can the UFOs assure them they are right when they aren't right?"

Craig was bewildered. How could anyone, especially this seemingly ordinary boy from god-knows-where, believe any of this stuff? It was quackery. Bordering on insanity. Bordering on dangerous.

"Aliens don't exist. God doesn't exist. Alternate universe may exist but the Basin is _definitely_ not a gateway to get to them. How does anyone actually believe all that?"

Craig couldn't even begin to imagine. But then again, Craig had never had much room for Gods. When he was a child, he had gone to church with his parents once a week, and he sat in the pews flicking lint from his pockets at his sister until she started hissing and stomping her feet and his mother had had to drag them both outdoors. Craig remembered the sunbeams that filtered through the church windows, and the dust that hung in the light like glinting sparks of gold, but mostly he remembered the heat and the boredom and the stale smell of old women's perfume and honestly, it was an experience so dull he recoiled from the memory like he might recoil from a hot object. Even at age fourteen, when his head was bloated with the fears and confusions of young life, the foundations for his thoughts on God were already formulating and even then, before he knew _how_ exactly it was cosmic bodies moved or what happened to a star swallowed by a black hole, he knew that there was no beauty of value in the dry rice paper pages of a hymn book when outside, there were pine trees, and above there were galaxies, and beneath him were stones a billion years old so how could a figure imprinted on crumbling paper compare to the perfect symmetry of endless space, or the complex elegance of the ground under his feet? How could a God, dysfunctional and susceptible to human flaws, compete with the unfaltering reality of the unimaginable numbers that separated galaxies, or the incomprehensible smallness of the chance that right now in this moment, he was himself and he was sitting with a strange boy with blonde hair and a sunburned face, staring at the red moon over the desert. He couldn't make sense of it now, any more than he could in the past.

He didn’t want to.

Tweek scratched the back of his neck tiredly.

"How could they not? I mean, think about it. Do you really want to be stuck here? Lying in some grave on this planet for all of eternity? No one will remember you or what you did and without something to believe in, it's like you never even mattered at all. Aren't you afraid of that even a little bit?"

Craig frowned, trying to recall the last time he worried about something like that? Was it when he received his letter of acceptance to university? Was it when his sister got married and Craig finished two expensive bottles of wine with no assistance and no one at his side? Maybe it was when he got his grade back for his thesis, and realised that he had wasted so much money on a single piece of paper, and now he was going to go back to his dorm room where his roommate would already be sleeping, and spend the rest of the night sitting at his desk figuring out what to do next. Where to go. What were his aims and goals for this life he never actually wanted.

The sound of traffic outside had been loud that night, and the room smelled like ramen noodles and dirty socks. When the digital alarm clock on his desk said three forty nine, Craig realised that even though he was there, and he was alive, there was no one around to see him in that moment and confirm that he was real. No one to assure him that all that work he had done and all that time he had spent had meant something. He felt empty. And tired. Like he wanted to undo that past six years all at once. He wished he could be at high school again. Stupid again. Unaware of everything and able to say it was okay. He was young. One day he will be older and he will be able to do things, and make things, and achieve things no one had ever achieved before.

What if no one wanted to hire him? What if he had to go back to his parents house, and spend all day every day sending out job applications from their basement for the rest of his life? What if he had to get _married_? Have a child and a mortgage and an affair at age forty, and when he turned sixty five cirrhosis of the liver might set in. Craig had always been predisposed towards ennui and pessimism, but in that moment he had never felt so hopeless in his life. He didn't feel like he had achieved anything. Instead, he felt like that same fourteen year old boy sitting in church, looking at the cracked paint on the face of the Virgin Mary and thinking about how pointless it was, this notion of God. How unfortunate it was that there were people out there who needed faith to compensate for the knowledge that one day, they were going to die. And how he envied them.

"I think it would be worse to live forever," he mused. "To just continue to exist, on and on. I didn't even ask to be alive in the first place."

"Well, yeah." Tweek sounded uneasy. More uneasy than usual. "But the idea is no one did. Not really. people are here because without being _here_ , they will never be able to find God out _ther_ _e."_

He waved his hand up in the direction of the sky, and Craig rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, okay. Fine. Do you want my opinion? Seems weird you haven't asked me for my thoughts on the Foundation yet, because I probably know more about this shit than everyone else here put together."

He had been saving up his opinions on the subject ever since the Foundation had cost him his first and only _real_ friend.

Tweek arched his eyebrows, but eventually responded.

"... Go on."

"Wouldn't it make more sense, if the universe ended, for all the souls here to be released into wherever the fuck it is the _real_ God is straight away? How could the 'material prison'," he punctuated this sentence with air quotes, "made by some inferior God be strong enough to keep all the goodness of the real God out? If that was the case, the lesser God would be the stronger one, so then everyone down at that compound would be far better off worshipping him."

Tweek thought about this for a moment, his expression mostly unreadable in the firelight. After a satisfactory period of contemplation, he sighed and let himself slouch a little, shoulders hunching up around his chin in disappointment.

"That's so uninteresting though," he reported. "Where are the aliens?"

Craig wondered if even Tweek himself knew how much of his fascination with the Foundation was related to its religious ideologies, or his apparent inclination toward the unusual.

"Not everything has to be about aliens," Craig assured him. "Besides, you seem to have all this information here, about the Foundation history and whatever, that proving the non-existence of extra-terrestrial messengers hardly seems like it should be important."

He rifled through newspaper articles, including photocopies of an extremely dated booklet published by the Foundation itself. Any number of reasonable explanations for the group and their activities seemed emergent - anxieties about the coming new millennium, the shift of the Hill abduction and similar incidents into public consciousness, the dawn of the nuclear age... the early sixties were an upsetting time for places like the Radiant Basin, and schisms in local churches hardly seemed unusual or out of place. Was Tweek starting to wonder why he had become fixated on this particular one? What made him different from any other single human being who in some way or another thought they had found God?

"... Well, I dunno. It seems important to me. I guess it’s like a way of affirming that out in the middle of space we aren't alone. Like something might be guiding us and helping us and just... ugh. Man."

He scratched his arm, listless, raking pale lines over his burned skin. Craig realised with a writhing and uneasy ball of feeling in his belly that he sounded so lost and disappointed that he almost regretted telling him this. Regretted making him stay in Barbelo, and dragging him out here where the skies were beyond comprehension and the emptiness of the desert was crushing in its silence. Craig thought about telling him about radio silence - about all the money and human effort that had gone into firing transmissions deep into space, only to receive nothing in return. About how those transmissions will keep on going, travelling for aeons into the future long after the sun had burned to dust, and how no-one would hear them because there were no aliens. No lights in the sky. Just the endless cycle of life and death, chance and biology playing together and ensuring that whatever happened in this world, no matter how many times a person lied to themselves and said they were a part of something greater than themselves, inside their bodies and inside their minds they would always be alone.

He chewed the inside of his cheek, and shuffled tighter against Tweek's side. The closeness was strange, because he hadn't been close enough to _anyone_ to smell their clothes or feel their body heat for a long time. Tweek smelled like he could use a wash, but not like he couldn't go to the supermarket or run a few errands without offending someone. He was warm.

"You're not alone now," Craig pointed out, half-heartedly "I'm here with you, right?"

"And what are you? An all benevolent all knowing God of the universe?"

"I'm former stardust," he lifted his hand in an unexpected invitation. It was quite spontaneous, but it felt appropriate. "Just like you."

For a second, it seemed as though Tweek was not satisfied. He glanced at Craig's hand critically, and then down at their fire, which was dropping in height and intensity and leaving a faint, smoky odour in its wake. Finally, (leaving enough time for Craig to feel awkward) he relented. He kept his eyes down as he took Craig's hand, and in silence they continued to watch the blood moon passing, first red, then orange, then back to spectral grey. The world didn't end - the sky did not start falling as the hour that Tweek was supposed to be at the compound passed them. In Tweek's palm, Craig could feel his heart beating, and maybe even the motions of his consciousness inside his flesh and bones.

He wondered if this was the closest he was ever going to get to God.

 

 _And there was evening_ ,  _and there was morning_ \- the fourth day.

 


	6. PART TWO - CHAPTER FIVE

They woke soon after the sun started rising. Craig was stiff and sore after a restless night - sleeping on a thin foam roll under the stars was not as ideal as it was made to sound in movies. Tweek, on the other hand, seemed rested enough to turn down a coffee made with water boiled over the little gas camping stove, and lug most of their stuff down the ridge without dropping or breaking anything at all. Craig ate a light breakfast, consisting of a bread roll and a floury apple, and managed to carry the binoculars all by himself. When he got to the bottom of the ridge and hauled himself into the passenger side of the car he was sweaty and light headed. Even more than usual for this hour of the day.

Jesus Christ man." Tweek unloaded both of their packs into the trailer and rounded the driver’s side of the car. "It's muggy today, right?"

"Mmm." Remembering he had left his pills in his caravan like some kind of an idiot, Craig rolled down his window and looked skyward. He still had a bad taste at the back of his throat from sleeping with his mouth hanging open, and the dampness on the air was making his lungs feel thick and difficult to fill. The sky was quilted and colourless, bordering on grey, just like it had been a few days ago when reports of rain were first coming in over the radio. For the first time in a long, long time, a part of Craig wandered if the rain may actually fall. If  he could look forward to the sound of water pattering on compacted dust sending him to sleep in his trailer that evening after so many months of silent nights. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, making these impossible thoughts seem so possible today.

"It'll pass."

He pulled his head back in the window and buckled his seat belt.

"It hasn't rained for years. Although I'm glad the clouds waited for the morning to move in. You have no idea how fucked off I would have been if I missed the blood moon."

"Yeah..."  Tweek glanced upwards, looked like he was about to say something, but then didn’t. He started the vehicle instead, and executed a reckless u-turn around the compacted parking area. Sucking a sharp breath in through his teeth, he pointedly failed to apologise for flinging Craig against the passenger door, before jamming the vehicle into second gear as though he thought a gentle touch would not be enough to do so.

"Don't fuck the gearbox," Craig warned him, adjusting his seatbelt as they rumbled and shuddered off down the dust road toward town. "Kenny will murder us."

"Sorry. I never drove a stick before."

Craig was understandably shocked to hear this.

He had thought Tweek had seemed pretty confident driving yesterday, and he was almost certain that his Sigma was manual. Underneath him, the Isuzu grumbled and laboured over compacted sand and dust. Only a few feet either side of them was the desert terrain, unforgiving of those who didn't know how to handle a four wheel drive at least. He could only _imagine_ how badly it would fuck up someone who couldn't even use a gear shift.

"You what?"

"Never drove stick. Everything I know about driving manual, I taught myself when I bought that silver car off some guy in Montreal on my way here."

He adjusted his rear-view mirror, even though there was not another car around for miles. Craig sat there staring at him. Was this some kind of a joke? Did he realise he was endangering both of their lives right now? His eyes drifted uneas to the demister right next to Tweek's right hand, and he almost didn't want to ask if he knew how to use it should it be necessary to do so.

Tweek coughed, clearly uncomfortable with Craig's staring, and made a weak attempt to change the subject.

"Anyway. I don't mean to be rough with it. It's just the gearbox on the other car is sticky so I developed the bad habit."

"... Were you not nervousabout piloting a vehicle you couldn't drive hundreds of miles across the USA ?"

"Terrified, actually. Most mortifying experience of my life."

He really _had_ been in a hurry to get here then, Craig thought. In a way, it was kind of admirable that whatever it was he had come here for, he had cared about it enough not to let a wanton lack of practical driving knowledge get in the way.

“Was it really _that_ urgent?”

“Uh huh. Armageddon isn't something a guy can be tardy for."

"Well, not technically. But that lot have a new Armageddon party three times a year. Surely they could have gone one more without you?"

"Hmm..." Tweek glanced sideways at him, and for a moment Craig thought he was sizing him up. "You say that like someone who doesn't know what it feels like to _believe_ something. Besides, there is a reason they keep having Apocalypse services over and over again. It's not because they think the previous one hasn't arrived yet."

This made Craig scoff.

"But it _hasn't_."

"Yeah, and the people I spoke to when I first got interested in the group? They genuinely believed that was because they had _stopped_ it."

Oh yeah.

Craig remembered Tweek mentioning that last night. The shear impossibility of such an idea, however, seemed significantly less mystical and magical in the daylight than it did on a ridge in the middle of the night. And it hadn't seemed particularly mystical or magical in the first place.

"Look," Craig was starting to get a little irritated now. His inability to understand the inner workings of the FTUC was bothering him much more than it should. "How does it not occur to these people that there is literally nothing powerful enough to stop the end of the world if the end of the world is approaching? The gravity, the energy... nature is too much for a person to comprehend, let alone bargain with or control. How would you even begin to achieve such a thing?"

"Well, you're forgetting that the average Disciple doesn't think they are dealing with nature and gravity or whatever. They believe they are dealing with a God. And the thing about God is that when you look at something, like the universe or a plant or your hands, and you decide that 'God' was the thing that made it, you give something as incomprehensible and utterly irrational as nature or luck a quantifiable, negotiable form. From there, you can bargain with your idea of 'God', and interact with it in a way that makes you feel like you have some kind of control over the things that happen in your life. For example, putting off the apocalypse."

The Isuzu choked under them, and it was actually a fairly concerning sound but Craig didn't notice. He was far too busy staring at Tweek, unable to tell if this was an idea he had come up with himself, or if he had read it in one of his books. Probably the latter.

"Alright..." there wasn't much in that point for him to argue with, much to his frustration. "I'll bite. How is someone supposed to negotiate the apocalypse with a God?"

"You asked me this last night. I told you. When the overhead lights indicate, you make an exchange."

"You didn't tell me that!"

"I did! We talked about aliens, remember?"

Craig didn't remember. But for the sake of hurrying him up he just nodded and went with it.

"Okay. Fine. Okay. But what do you mean by exchange?"

He was actually on the edge of his seat. This was something he would _love_ to hear. Whatever it was, it had to be good in order to keep people believing.

Tweek shrugged, eyes fixed straight ahead on the road.

"Traditionally, the payment made for spiritual life is _physical_ life on a date of cosmological significance. Like I dunno… a lunar eclipse? And apparently, the best way to convince a physical life to forfeit their body is to wait for some Stupid Canadian Loser to come along and say 'Hey, I want to die, but also I want my death to mean something so maybe can you guys help me out?'."

He jerked the gearstick, and the vehicle lurched forward in a way that made Craig's stomach turn over. 

He didn't really have much to say to that, and Tweek’s expression had shifted to one of bitterness unsuited to his features so he wasn’t sure he wanted to question him further anyway.

He thought he might just take some time to think this new information over. In a way, he kind of thought it sounded like a joke.

It _had_ to be a joke. Didn’t it?

If it was, Craig thought it wasn’t very funny.

Trying to project a sense of outward relaxation, he watched from the corner of his eye as Tweek scraping the 4x4 gearstick into a final approximation of use. Significantly less comfortable than he had been when they started their journey, Craig settled back in for the ride, looking at the sky and trying to distract himself by thinking about what kind of reaction the thick clouds were garnering in the town.

...

 

Craig could hardly believe it.

By the time they got back to town, it was raining.

It wasn't heavy rain, or even particularly wet rain, but he could see when parked the pickup in the garage lot that there were spatters of water on the windscreen, and when he stumbled out of the car and stretched his cramped and aching legs there were tiny dark spots of water on the tarmac under his feet. Bewildered, he looked to Tweek, who was critically inspecting his sunburn in the rear view.

"Oh man, I look like shit." He was saying, as though he had never been host to such phenomena before. Craig frowned, unsure as to why Tweek wasn't paying more attention to the weather. Had he not noticed? Maybe he had noticed, and just wasn't aware of how unusual it was.

"It’s raining," Craig pointed out helpfully. Tweek stood up straight to examine his hands, seeing if any errant droplets of water would be considerate enough to fall onto his palms.

"Hardly."

Craig sighed and rounded the car, peering into the convenience store to see if Scott was in there today, watching Netflix on the old store computer  and waiting for customers to buy ice creams or Gnome repellent or batteries .

The store lights were off, and it looked to Craig as though the petrol pumps had not even been unlocked this morning. When he turned around to look down the street, he saw that there was not a single soul around. A feeling of unease began to creep through his stomach, although he couldn’t really put his finger on why. It wasn’t like Barbelo was teaming with life most of the time.

"Let’s get back to the hotel," he said, reaching over to grab his stuff. "I wonder if Kenny and Butters have finished arguing yet."

He told himself as they started down the sidewalk that it was probably nothing. The convenience store was closed today because it was a Monday - one of the quietest days in the local week. So what if it was only just nearing noon? Business had been slow, and because of the rain Scott had thought it would be safer to close up and get back to the hotel to help Kenny. There wasn't anything sinister about it. He was just being paranoid.

The little knot of worry in his belly eased a fraction as they came around the side of the hotel and everything outside looked as-per-usual. There were a couple of cars out front, and in the windows Craig could see locals taking their midday meals, probably pouring over the weekend edition of the bugle and glancing worrisomely out the window from time to time, attempting to establish if the rain would fall harder or if the clouds which brought it would eventually disappear. The telephone in the hotel kitchen was probably ringing off the hook - whenever a rain scare came around, Butters always got orders for delivery meals and Civil Defence Services, which really were _not_ his responsibility, and now that the dreaded water had actually started falling the older citizens were probably in fits of anxiety, cloistered in their homes with two-by-fours nailed over the windows.

The rain started coming down a little harder, and Craig could _definitely_ feel drops of wetness on his nose and cheeks now as he crossed the little parking zone out front. The almost inaudible tick of water dripping on the roofs of the cars parked outside the hotel brought back memories of winter in the city. Of grey skies reflected in glass sided buildings, and tarmac which smelt chemical and sharp as he walked across it.

For the first time in several years, Craig shivered from the cold. Or from the memory of the cold, which in a way seemed more acute than the reality.

"If the rain picks up, you won't need to shower when we get back." he observed dryly. Tweek, whose hair was starting to get damp and whose grubby white tee was starting to go transparent on his shoulders, looked confused.

"Huh?"

"Yesterday you said you were going to shower when you got home." He led them to walk a little faster, closing the gap between the middle of the car park and the veranda over the hotel front door. "But if it rains any harder, you won’t need to. Get it?"

"Oh." Tweek frowned, as if he didn't think this was particularly funny. "Yeah. Okay. I get it."

They opened the hotel door, as per the instruction on the 'We are OPEN, come on in!’ sign in the window, and a blast of heat rushed forward, dissolving any lingering memories of winter from Craig's mind.

"Jesus Christ!" Tweek seemed just as startled as he was. "Is it hot in here or is it just me?"

"Its about a million degrees," Craig assured him, venturing forward into the bar to investigate what the situation was.

Apparently, the situation was that Kenny (or some presumptuous local) had saw fit to load the disused bar fireplace and light it, as if doing so would diminish the rainy greyness outside. The locals who had gathered in the building were a sight to behold, dressed in scarves and dusty coats that looked untouched for decades. The people in this part of the Americas had rarely encountered weather of any persuasion other than 'blazing', and the conversation over club sandwiches and slice was subdued and terse. A few people stopped talking to stare at Craig when he walked toward the back of the bar, or maybe at Tweek followingin his wake. The conversation softened to near silence, which made Tweek uncomfortable, but he didn't say anything. Craig felt tugging behind him, and realised that Tweek was actually clutching the bottom of his shirt. He couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed as Tweek followed him dutifully across the space, only to stand right up beside him as he reached forward to ring the bell sitting next to the till. His fingers did not uncurl from the fabric of Craig's tee.

"Don't freak out Craig, but I think that guy over there is staring at us?"

Craig ignored him. The bar top bell seemed to shatter the stillness that had fallen over the onlookers. Kenny didn’t even have a moment to appear before someone with an old and crotchety voice Craig didn't recognise called to him, and Tweek's grip on his clothing became almost violent.

"So you'd be the mechanic who doomed us all?"

The man was weathered and old, sitting under the front facing window of the bar, and Craig was slightly confused at the accusation he was making. Although not confused enough to not be offended.

"... Excuse you?"

He turned around and scanned the room for a familiar face, making eye contact with Sherriff Black,   sitting huddled with Bebeand her brood. Token coughed uncomfortably, and looked away.

"You. You call yourself a mechanic and you can't even fix a car. Now most of us with broken vehicles are _stuck_ here, waiting for the floods to sweep us and our families away. You've doomed us all. You and your city boyfriend there, who brought down the floo-"

"Oh fuck Craig, thank God."

Kenny's head appeared in the kitchen doorway, and Craig noted with a guilty pinch that he looked dishevelled and a little irate past few days had done _many_ things to him Craig had never seen before. Noting this made Craig even _more_ uncomfortable with this turn of meteorological events than he had been a few seconds previously.

"Thank God you're back. I thought you two were fuckin’ goners. Ignore the crazy guy, come through in here." He gestured for the two of them to come into the kitchen, and exchanging a look Tweek and Craig did as invited. They passed into the kitchen, which was just as sweltering as the pub itself, and had a look around.

The place was a _mess_. Kenny was a great host, but a terrible cook, and by the looks of things cooking was what he had had to do oday and possibly the day before. Butters was nowhere to be seen.

"Where's your friend?" Tweek asked, and Kenny scowled and indicated that he should close the door behind him just in case anyone outside might be eavesdropping.

"Fucking B _utters_ ," he glowered, hitching himself onto the food preparation table to sit and patting his pockets. Craig watched with a sense of disbelief as he produced a packet of Dunhills and a lighter, and pursed one of the cigarettes between his lips. "Butters is gone. He ditched me here. Left everything broken and fucked and I have been _swamped -"_

He was cut off by the phone ringing, on its hook by the kitchen door. The filthy look he shot it would have been enough to kill a man of a weak constitution.

In a good show of initiative, possibly because he was accomplished at observing when persons in his immediate vicinity was on the verge of snapping and murdering everybody, Tweek edged toward the phone, picked it up off the hook, and pressed his finger down on the button to hang up. Kenny exhaled, eyes shifting off the phone back to Craig, and Craig observed he was shaking a little as he lit his cigarette. His face was pale, and although he was doing a good job of being angry in order to stave off concern there was something about the way he moved which betrayed a genuine fear of the coming evening. Possibly even the future of his job itself.

For the first time, a gasp of true terror brushed against Craig's nerves. He quashed it, reminded himself that history had proven the town capable of fending off minor rainfall at least, and hoped that Tweek would not fall into the anxiety trap with the others. The few days Craig had known him had confirmed that he was certainly the sort disposed towards hysterics and ungrounded fear.

"I've been swamped by people all morning. The rain is making them _nuts_. And they are blaming everything and everyone for it. They reckon it's your fault all the cars are breaking down, and it's my fault for hiring you, and worse yet groups of Disciples have been walking around the town _all morning_. It's fucking spooky as hell, and I don't want anything to do with it."

"Okay?" Craig was tentative, glancing sideways at Tweek who, if possible, was more astonished by all of this than he was. "Well, that's kind of weird I guess. Do you know what they’re here for?"

Craig couldn't even begin to imagine. It wasn't common for Disciples to stay in town longer than it took to purchase toilet paper and vegetables.

Kenny narrowed his eyes at the pair of them, as if he was trying to size them up. Beside him, Craig felt Tweek fold his arms defensively over his chest and shuffle closer.

"You want to know?" He asked, and the way he asked gave Craig a deeply foreboding feeling.

Suddenly, he wasn't sure he did.

"Yes.”

He tried to keep his voice as steady as possible, and ignored how Tweek was edging so close that their shoulders were touching. Craig felt a bit like he was being used as a human shield.

Kenny's eyes flickered to Tweek, and he nodded his head incrementally in his direction.

"They're looking for him."

This was probably the worst possible thing he could have said. Next to Craig's arm, like a small animal caught in bright headlights, Tweek's body went rigid and cold. Craig felt a swinging nausea in the bottom of his belly that may have been shock, but may also have been a twinge of possessiveness.

"They what?"

Kenny shook his head a fraction and slid down off the table.

"That's just what I've heard," he stubbed his half smoked cigarette out on the sink. "Everyone's been asking where you two were. What you were up to. They have this weird idea that the Foundation made it start raining. They reckon it'll stop if they hand him over."

"Hand him over?!"

How utterly abominable.

Suddenly, Craig didn't recognise his friend in front of him. He didn't recognise the kitchen they were standing in, or even the humid grey view of the desert beyond the kitchen window. Since when had this town become so critical of outsiders? Craig had truly believed, for two whole years, that the community he had decided to settle amongst was above that.

"What do you mean 'hand him over'? Are you serious?" He looked at Tweek, who had gone an unhealthy tissue paper white, and tried to imagine him having _anything_ to do with the rain coming down over the Basin. Regardless of whether or not the Foundation had decided to blame him for the rainfall, they had hundreds of new recruits every year! It wasn't like they couldn’t find a new Jesus or whatever. Tweek had even failed to actually show up at the compound in the first place! It was unthinkable, that this java-guzzling nervous wreck of a so-called architect could be responsible for _any_ unusual turn of events, save a sudden shortage of coffee grounds. 

Craig couldn't have made this up.

Kenny shrugged, and whipped a tea towel off the hook above the stove.

"They said it. Not me."

Craig could tell from his tone that whether he wanted to be or not, Kenny was engaged in the same internal struggle as everyone else in Barbelo - between his rational mind and that fitful, irrational part of himself which wanted nothing more for this whole horrible thing to be over, and for everything to return to the way it always was.

For a moment, Craig stood there in gobsmacked silence, feeling a shocking, numbing feeling as all of the stability and trust he thought he knew in the town was ripped away. This had been his _home_. This monotony of sun and sand and heat beating down day after day. He had hated it, but it was home, and now dark clouds were gathering, and he realised how fragile his illusion of security here had been the whole time.

"... So what? Are you going to 'hand him over'?"

Tweek gave him a look of pure horror, and Kenny scoffed, beginning to dry the dishes sitting in the dish rack next to the sink with an unfamiliar fever.

"Maybe you two better go camp out in the trailer," he informed them. "I'll pretend I never saw either of you."

Craig balked at this. Did Kenny think he was being generous? He gave him a look that intended to be furious, but more likely just came across as hurt.

"The Isuzu is in the garage lot." He said coldly, "I left the keys in the ignition."

With Tweek scurrying after him like a scared child, Craig stalked across the kitchen to the rear exit and the relative safety of his stupid fucking trailer in the yard.

When the door slammed behind them, Kenny stopped his dish drying and let out a shaky breath.

The phone, which Tweek had ignorantly replaced in the cradle on the hook, began ringing once again.

 

...

 

Craig dug some microwave meals out of the back of his minifridge, and in silence they sat on Craig's bed looking around at the posters and forcing themselves not to comment on how, with the clouds overhead darkening by the minute, it was very nearly dark at four pm.

in ran in rivulets down the windowpanes, and much to Craig's disgust it actually _was_ cold now - the microwave meatballs on rice had done nothing to diminish the chill settling in their bones. Craig had needed to dig around in the drawers under his bed for a sweater, and he had provided one for Tweek too even though it was far too small. The mugginess of the morning had completely disappeared, and only the clear cold of a stormy few days remained. It seemed very much as though the rain was intending to stay.

"... My stuff is still in the hotel." Tweek told him, after a sufficient period of awkward silence. He was sitting cross legged on the far end of the mattress, and he had hardly touched his meal. Craig had yet to ask him for his thoughts regarding his status as the Radiant Basin's Most Wanted. His sentiments were written all over his face anyway, and if Craig wasn't too wrapped up in his own sulking he would have tried to console him.

"We can get it some other time." Craig said from his corner, gazing out the window over the head of his bed and observing the way that the rain was making his breath fog on the glass when he exhaled. "You won't leave without it I promise."

"Mmm... I dunno Craig. I kind of want to leave right now."

Craig smiled a humourless smile and looked to him.

"Same," he said, and he realised that he meant it. For some reason, being here was making him feel strange and claustrophobic. He had the most peculiar urge to get up and leave right now immediately, and never ever, ever look back. A sharp contrast to what he had wanted almost every moment of the past few years until now. Maybe his feelings were hurt by the way Kenny had treated him. Maybe he was bitter, about the way the townsfolk he had thought of as his peers had decided to blame him for their shitty cars breaking down. Perhaps it was the rain, stirring uncomfortable feelings in him, which made him feel too big and emotional for the confines of his body, and this caravan, and this town. He listened to the rain falling on the trailer roof and he wondered, what would it be like to walk out there shivering, and let the water soak into his clothes and his skin and his hair.

"But you can’t leave your stuff. When it stops raining, we can pack up our shit and leave. I will fix your car tomorrow. You can drive me to State City and we can go our separate ways."

Tweek gave him a shaky little smile and set his half-eaten dinner down carefully on the floor next to the bed.

"You want to come with me?" He asked, and Craig shrugged, trying to look non-committal even though that was exactly what he wanted.

"I don't know. For some reason I just have the urge to go a fast food place at four am on a Friday, and be enrolled in a real college again, and buy my alcohol from a bottle shop instead of a petrol station or hotel bar."

It was like he was being born all over again.

"Hmm..." Tweek fixed his eyes on Craig, and Craig got the feeling he was being x-rayed. Examined for a lie, or a trick, or a joke even though Tweek's mouth was curved into a sad little smile. "None of those things are that great."

"Neither is sitting out here doing nothing."

He looked at the poster of the northern lights, which he had tacked on the door of the cupboard over the sink. From this angle, he could only see part of it, but all the same it seemed to hold the promise of something new and distant. A completely different angle from which to examine the same stars. He had never felt the urge to see it in person before, but he did now.

"I guess not." Tweek let himself flop sideways, onto his back in the middle of the bed. Craig sat in the corner, looking upwards at the bilious, growling sky.

“Come lie with me,” he invited. And for a moment, Craig was taken aback. Was this really an appropriate time for Tweek to be making a move?

Then he decided he didn't care, and with a weary huff he wiggled down the bed and lay there, head resting a few inches further down the mattress than Tweek's shoulder. He closed his eyes. The rain made it easy to recall lying in his bed in his home town in the mountains. A little snowy place where nothing happened, and nothing changed. It was kind of like Barbelo except everybody knew his history there - tanned even in winter and towering tall over everyone, the exceptionally bright albeit delinquent Craig Tucker stood out like a parrot in a flock of sparrows.

Everybody had expected him to achieve great things, but now he was already well into his twenties and he had achieved nothing.

Maybe it was about time he made an effort to do so. Maybe it was time he went somewhere new.

Last time Craig had decided to make a change in his life he had been thwarted by the Foundation and its promises about salvation. For him, getting on a bus and visiting a fellow amateur astronomer he met at a convention one time had somehow become a life changing decision. It had turned out that his astronomer friend was of the sort easily seduced by promises of eternal life. Craig seemed to have a habit of attracting those kinds of people - Kenny would have called it his 'Type'.  Regardless, the randomness of circumstance, and the unexpected twists a life could take, never failed to impress and terrify Craig simultaneously. Likewise, the way in which repetitions and patterns emerged from chaos left him sympathetic, but only slightly, towards those who might have thought their lives were guided by benevolent, omnipotent hands. He never would have thought, leaving Boulder on a bus in torrential rain, that he might someday leave Barbelo the same way, except with a flighty stranger and the significantly more ambitious goal to be alive. To stay alive. To find something worth living for even if killed him.

If Craig didn't justify his own existence, then nobody else on earth would do it for him.

Almost a whole hour passed, before either of them spoke again. Craig was already drifting, the sound of the rain morphing into a nearly forgotten harmony of traffic and electricity and the sound of connection. His ears rung with the chorus of Restaurants on cold evenings and beaches on warm ones. The warmth of fluorescent mall lights lingered on his skin. At the back of his mouth, he thought he could taste the very particular flavour of a McDonald’s soft serve at one am. When was the last time he had been to the cinema? When was the last time he went to a playground? A swimming pool? The notion of a large body of water seemed like a dream. Mythical. Magical.

He wasn't sure how it had eventuated, but Tweek's hand was laced in his and it was warm. The sound of his voice when he spoke was soft and tired. Craig cracked his eyes open and looked to him, noting the way his green eyes were unfocused, like he was contemplating something an uncountable amount of miles away. 

"Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters," he said, "and let it divide the waters from the waters."

"Huh?" Craig stirred, shuffling up the bed so their heads were level with one another. Despite not wanting to release him, he wiggled his fingers a little looser in Tweek's grip. His palm was starting to get sweaty and a little gross – how unfamiliar.

 "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Craig still didn't understand.

Tweek shook his head, turning his eyes down from the faintly glowing constellations painted on the ceiling above and fixing them on Craig. Outside, the rain fell so much harder - like fragments of the blue beyond the clouds were suicide dropping onto the earth.

"The sky is falling." he clarified, and Craig was most taken with the way the words looked on his lips. "After aeons and aeons of time, the sky is finally starting to fall."

 

 

 _And there was evening_ ,  _and there was morning_ \- the fifth day.


	7. PART TWO - CHAPTER SIX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter is by natteregn, and can be found [here](http://spbigbang.org/art-galleries/spbb2016gallery?thumb_limitstart=40#!spbb2016_art_by_natteregn01_02)

It wasn't the rain that woke him, and nor was it the restless shuffling of Tweek, tucked in on the stretcher in the middle of the caravan floor. Rather, he was roused at three am, by fist falls on the door of the caravan, blurring into the metallic thumping of rain on the roof of the trailer. For a moment, Craig was fifteen again and it was a Saturday morning. His mother was knocking on his door, intending to drag him out of bed and eject him forcibly into the world. Then suddenly it was right now. He was twenty-seven , and he was in a darkened trailer in the middle of a stormy desert, and literally the only thing he could think when he pushed himself up feebly and reached for his bedside lamp was Kenny. Fucking Kenny. He had _better_ be here to apologise! How dare he have the audacity to wake him at such an unholy hour of the night?

Sleepy, disorientated, and pissed off, Craig heaved himself out of bed and hobbled over toward the door. His legs were still sore from the hike up the ridge, and the few hours sleep he had had were unsatisfactoryThe rain had interfered with his dreams, and left his mind foggy with memories he had thought forgotten. He was confused, when his shin collided with the end of the stretcher, and for a moment he didn't recognise the blonde hair or hunched shape of the figure curled up foetally under the blankets.

"Hey," he kicked the end of the stretcher, and the figure bolted upright as though he had just had a car battery attached to one or more his extremities.

"Huh?!"

Craig remembered Tweek. The worrisome apostate who was going to give him a ride back to civilization. Possibly his only real friend in the world.

Civilization. Craig remembered that he planned to go back there. That soon enough he would be leaving this cramped caravan and this dusty desert for good. That must not forget to take his NASA posters with him when he goes.

"Can you hear that?" Craig asked. Tweek's face took on an expression of concern, and he turned to glance over his shoulder into the dark at the other end of the van.

"What?" His voice sounded bad - like he had just smoked a whole cigar before crawling into bed. "The rain?"

"No..." Craig paused, trying to listen for the knocking again over the rain. Sure enough, it came, and Tweek's shoulders hunched rigidly in horror.

"That?" He asked. Craig nodded.

"Who would be here at this time of night?" Craig asked him, not really expecting him to know the answer. "In the _rain_?"

Tweek looked stricken. Craig sighed and gestured for him to move so he could crawl over the stretcher and get past to the door.

"Stand backthen. I’ll handle it."

His companion scrambled to do as he was told, knocking a few empty soda cans off the edge of the sink in the process.

Craig made it to the door, and inched aside the small curtain covering the window to see who it was standing outside.

It was no one he recognised - without the light from the moon and the stars it was almost black as pitch out, and Craig could only make out the vague silhouettes of three people standing closely huddled together on his step. For some reason, Kenny hadn't turned the back hotel light on. This struck Craig as strange, but his mind was too tired and pre-occupied to consider it further. He gestured for Tweek to stand well back into the shadowy area of the trailer, just in case it was townsfolk come to cast him to the Foundation scouts like a Christian to the lions, and cracked open the door just enough for him to poke his head through.

"What kind of a time do you call this?" He peered into the darkness, coiling an arm out to feel for the pull string which would turn on his outside light. The knocking figures didn't respond, which he found more than a little unsettling. Or maybe they did respond and he just didn't hear them over the thunderous sound of water hitting the compacted earth. Outside, it was incredibly and unnaturally cold. Craig's arm was riled with gooseflesh when he finally found the lamp switch and gave it a tug.

The late-night knockers were not Kenny, as he had first suspected, or even townsfolk as had been his second guess. In fact, two of the knockers were complete strangers. Only the third visitor (although significantly more bald than he had been two years previous) was familiar, and even then Craig couldn't recognise any of the thoughts that might have been evident on his face.

'Clyde?!"

"Hello Craig." Clyde gave him a polite smile, the kind of smile reserved for strangers who meet each other on a long country road. "I trust we haven't disturbed you this evening?"

Craig was speechless, completely at a loss for where he was even supposed to _start_ with that.

"What the fuck do you want!?"

It was a good place to start. Craig had dedicated a lot of time to thinking about some choice things he wanted to say to Clyde, if he was ever inconvenienced by seeing him again, but unfortunately at that moment they all eluded his recollection. He tried not to look at his face too long, at his familiar boyish features and muddy hazel eyes. Instead, he yanked the door open a little wider and regarded the dripping guests on his doorstep as a whole, rendered in frosted seventy five watt yellow light. The plain white robes they were wearing looked almost transparent with wetness, their faces were almost uniform in expression and composure. Craig, trembling a little with the effort, forced himself not to acknowledge the memory of Clyde's expressions rising to the surface of his mind. For some unknowable and cruel reason, he still retained a catalogue of smiles and pouts and silly conversations under Eric, and all of this information was flooding forth now in a way that made him feel sort of sick.

He distracted himself by thinking that the one who had knocked, standing front and centre, may have been a woman. But he had never had the misfortune to behold a woman like her before in his life. The light reflected in her eyes seemed manic and ungrounded - her thoughts completely detached from her physical body which was very much a picture of self-control. Craig got the most irrational sense that these people, having woken him, were bordering on demented. Their urgent fanaticism, the frisson of their excitement, came off them in overpowering waves. A deeply primitive place in his chest told him that they were probably a threat. He should close the door on them right now, remove himself as quickly as possible from the completely incomprehensible drama that was more than likely about to unfold.

"We want the Defector." The woman told him in a clear, ringing voice. "The one you call 'Tweek'. have reason to believe he is here, with you."

Deep in the dark shadows of his caravan, Craig heard Tweek inhale sharply and edge further away. Soon he would be jammed into the far corner, where Craig had shoved the mop and buckets and broom Kenny had gotten him a few days earlier. Craig would probably have to coax him out with a bag of Brazilian roast.

Somewhere, deep under the layers of confusion and nausea and fear, Craig was nigh _furious_ that the fool had gotten himself into such a disaster of a situation with this, a cult of lunatics. Didn't they teach kids about the dangers of apocalyptic religious movements in school? Or why it was hella fucking stupid to volunteer as a human sacrifice to a questionable God? Craig couldn't remember if anyone had ever gone out of their way to mention these things, or taught him this himself, but he felt as though that was probably something that Tweek should have learned.

Despite all of this annoyance, and despite being hyper-aware of the sounds Tweek was making in his scramble to be as small and invisible as possible, Craig maintained a calm facade, and leaned into the door frame to block their line of sight into the trailer.

"What? Why would you think that?"

"Well, he's certainly not in the hotel." Clyde was the one who spoke this time, his voice sounded well measured and clear, but unfamiliar. Despite his efforts to the contrary, Craig remembered the evenings they had spent drinking beers together, listening to Warrant and discussing whether or not they could just stay in Clyde's trailer out the back of the hotel forever or if it would be wiser to buy a house. He would bet his soul that back then, he didn't sound anything like he did now. Even his pronunciation was different. "People have been saying the two of you have been spending a lot of time together."

"Have we?"

It was hard to feign ignorance. Particularly when Craig heard the tell-tale sound of a mop falling, and Tweek yelping a swear behind his back. He hoped the rain would drown out the sound of him fucking around and jeopardising his own ass.

Clyde nodded.

"Word is the two of you headed out into the desert yesterday to go camping. Some folks were thinking you might not have come back."

"Why would I not come back?" Craig had never been a great actor. "I like it here. Nice job. Nice trailer. Usually the weather is pretty nice too."

Without allowing the polite expression on his face to shift, Clyde retorted.

"Not for long."

At that moment, Tweek kicked a bucket full of rags and nails and other caravan maintenance bits and bobs, and the whole pathetic lie came tumbling down around them both.

Craig cursed in frustration, and flung the door open to reveal Tweek standing there, swaddled in shadows, staring down in numb terror at the spilled screws and bits-and-pieces he had scattered over the floor.

"Jesus Christ Tweek! For someone whose number one priority is guarding his ass, you sure are shit at guarding your ass!"

The transformation on the part of the night knockers was instantaneous.

"Grab him!"

The woman's shriek was loud and horrible, and in response Tweek hollered and seized one of the brooms jumbled around his legs like it was a weapon.

"No!" He was panicked, almost frenzied. "Oh no you don't! Fuck off!"

He swung the broom haphazardly, clobbering Craig in the side of the head and nearly taking his eye out. Craig had to grab onto the door to stop himself collapsing. Without pausing to apologise, Tweek was flinging himself out the door and striking at the Disciples, a flurry of unwashed hair and broomstick knocking them backward into the mud and rain.

Clyde fell first, his formerly-chubby body making a heavy thumping smack into a shallow puddle below. The woman followed, taking a hearty broom hit right to her belly. She doubled over in pain and without pausing even for a second, Tweek kicked her backward too into the mud. Craig watched all of this from his spot hunched against the doorframe. His head felt as though it had been cracked open, and when he got his hands on Tweek the Disciples were going to have to wait in line because Craig was going to fucking _kill_ him. 

"Are you mad?!" He gasped, watching through the sleet as Tweek drive the third Foundation member against the pub wall with the bristle end of the broom. He stumbled out of the trailer and over Clyde, who was writhing on the ground in pain ( _good_ ), and let the cold water cut through his shock. The chill helped to ease his throbbing temple.

“Tweek!”

Could he even hear him yelling, over the cataclysm of sound from the rain?

“Tweek! Holy fuck get off him.”

He grabbed Tweek's shoulder and jerked him backwards, very nearly becoming subject to a second encounter with the broom.

“What in the hell do you think you are doing?!”

Tweek stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes. His whole body was quivering, and though the outburst of violence he had just experienced had startled him and exhausted him, both at the same time. Against the wall of the pub, Craig could see the Foundation member breathing heavily, his arms up and his eyes fixed closely on the business end of Tweek's weapon.

“I won't let them take me away with them.” He insisted, and Craig wondered what dark, unknown cavern of his balls he was salvaging all this from. Until about four minutes ago, Craig would have categorised Tweek as the kind who wouldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Or at least, he wouldn’t be the kind to beat the shit out of someone with a broom.

“They aren’t going to!” Craig told him, doing his best not to sound angry, or stressed, or concerned at the way Tweek seemed to be fraying at the edges. Maybe he didn’t want to go driving cross-country with someone like him after all? It probably wasn’t sensible to drive hundreds of miles to god knows where with someone who had proven themselves disposed towards sudden mental fractures. 

“But they will!” Tweek's grip on the broomstick handle was slipping, his shaking becoming so bad that Craig might have described it as vibration. He looked colder than even Craig felt out here in the dark and wet, his hair sticking to his face in tendrils and his lips and cheeks bleached white by the caravan lamp. “They _need_ me. Without me it’s over. It’s all o _ver_.”

“What's over?” Craig asked, wiping water and a small amount of blood out of his eyes with impatience. “The worlds going to end? Is that it?”

And Tweek's response, or lack of thereof, made his stomach drop to his ankles even though he knew it was a stupid thing to believe. The whites of his eyes seemed greater than his irises, his whole person shuddering in fear and yet standing in defiance, and Craig thought it was as though something new and chaotic had been unleashed within him. The fear of being taken, of being subject to the fancy of these people and their God had not meshed well with his new life direction, and Craig understood that in a way, this was his fault. He wasn’t the one who had _directly_ knocked Clyde into the dirt without a moments consideration for his safety, and he wasn’t the one who had _directly_ winded a woman using the stick end of a cleaning device, but Craig had been the one who had lead him away from their church with his assurance of the silent, thoughtless release of death, and his talk of an infinite, indifference space spanning unthinkable time and distance in every direction.

He felt slightly culpable, but didn’t want to extend any sympathy to these people or their cause.

He didn’t have all that much time though, to figure out what to do.

“There's _hundreds_ of us.” He hissed. “All over this town. We will burn it to the _ground_ unless you come with us right now.”

And that was pretty much the _second_ Craig decided that he had had enough of this.

He was going to get out of here if it was the last thing he did.

Craig had been in a few fights in his day, and he had probably won at least half of them. A child with a penchant for expressing dissatisfaction with his fists instead of his words, he had learned a lot about beating the shit out of someone on the playground, and he figured that now was as good a time as any to put those skills to use. In fact, it was probably even the _best_ time - fighting with an actual valid reason was something twelve-year-old Craig Tucker had thought he would never have the opportunity to do.

And just to re-familiarise himself with the intricacies of a hearty scuffle, he figured he may as well give this asshole a decent uppercut to the face.

The man’s head snapped back and clapped hard against the Hotel wall. Tweek gasped and sprung backwards, almost stumbling into the group of people encroaching but managing to right himself and duck out of reach again.

"W _hat the fuck Craig_?!"

"Coming from the guy who smacked me with a fucking _broom!_ " Craig spun around, confident that the guy he had punched would be nursing too big a concussion to grab them from behind, and brought his fists up to guard his face while he assessed the situation unfolding. Maybe twelve new Disciples, all closing in, some of whom were making to seize Tweek by the clothes and hair. Clyde was heaving himself upright a few feet away, but the woman was still prone in the mud by Craig's trailer stairs.

"There's too many to fight Craig! We're just two people!"

"I know that, you fuckin' dickheaded shit!"

Tweek was being thoroughly unhelpful, although Craig knew he had a point. There _were_ too many people for the pair of them to clobber them all. Their best bet would be to run for the back door to the hotel and lock it behind them.

"Just punch anyone who gets too close and follow me."

He ducked behind the other man, slowly backing against the side of the building, and aimed straight for the ten foot gap between the hotel and the Foundation member on the far wing of the group approaching. Detecting his movement, the group moved in sync to cut him off. Just behind them, the hotel door stood and hopefully unlocked, a sanctuary from the violence and the wet and the cold of the rain.

Craig regretted not sending Tweek in before him, as the other boy was significantly bulkier and probably much more proficient at breaking crowds. All the same, Craig was ready to hold his own, throwing his first punch the moment he was within distance of the closest aggressor.

The figure was frail and possibly elderly, and they dropped like a fly in a bug zapper. Behind him, Craig could hear Tweek fighting off a man a little closer to their own age, and by the sounds of things he was doing pretty well. Another faceless stranger came upon him, and Craig jerked his knee up into this one’s balls, not stopping to check if they even had balls to connect with.

They didn't, but he managed to get them down anyway, delivering the most poorly executed left-handed punch of all time directly into their throat. It sent them sideways into one of their companions, but also sent pain radiating through his injured knuckles. The bandage he had gotten a few days earlier from Kyle began to come loose as he shook the ache off and ploughed his shoulder against the oncoming crowd. Tweek hollered something behind him, and Craig heard the gut-churning sound of a bone breaking. For a horrifying moment, he thought it may have been an injury for his team, but the murderous howl of agony didn’t sound like Tweek's voice. Feeling a jolt of second-hand triumph, Craig managed to cover the final three feet of space and press himself up against the Hotel door.

"Tweek!" He yelled so hard it hurt his throat. "Come through!"

The flailing, groping bodies around him, their hands clutching at his pyjama pants and arms, were bordering on repulsive. Tweek flung himself out from between the crushing grip of the group just as Craig twisted the knob and swung in the door. The two boys slumped inside, and without needing to communicate the urgency of the situation, the pair of them rounded and applied their full bodyweight against the madmen outside.

With all the resistance, Disciple’s bodies pushing and trying to force their way through the gap, it was miraculous that they managed to get the door shut behind them. Tweek slammed the deadbolt into position, and as soon as their weight was removed, the pair of them standing soaking wet and facing the door, the old painted wood seemed to bulge inwards, creaking and groaning against the sound of massing people, fracturing the silence of the duo trying to catch their breath.

Fleetingly, Craig caught himself wondering if he was dreaming.

 

…

 

“Can you see anything?”

Craig shook his head, straining his eyes to peer through the window and make out any movement around the caravan.

“No. Nothing. Fuck.”

His knuckles still ached from punching his way through the throng of people. He heaved a sigh and turned away from the window, searching for Tweek in the dim light from the gas lamp on the table. He didn’t have to look very far. Perched on the end of the bench, cross egged and gnawing at his fingernails with a ferocity that may have left him fingerless if Craig allowed it to continue, Tweek couldn’t keep his gaze fixed in one place. His constant jiggling and shuffling made it seem as though there was something inside him, struggling to be released, and whether or not that something was his skeleton or some kind of explanation for the events unfolding it was impossible to say. Maybe it was an apology, for thumping Craig in the face with broom handle back there. A word of remorse would probably not have gone awry.

Craig huffed, letting his eyes roam the shadowy landscape of the deserted kitchen. The rain was still falling outside, a little lighter than it had been before, and under the sink pipes creaked and gurgled. As far as either Tweek or Craig knew, however, this was the only sound in the entire place. After those few punches and a swift escape into the safety of the pub kitchen, Craig had watched, paralyzed with blood boiling fury, as the Foundation had ransacked his caravan and dragged what looked like most of his property into the rain. Tweek’s efforts to find help in the upstairs and dining room had been unsuccessful – most likely everyone in town had gone back to their homes when darkness fell, and the power cut in the bar had more than likely extended to the suburb beyond the hotel and kept everybody tethered to their properties. It was slightly uncomfortable, to squat in the place when neither Kenny nor Butters were around, but inside the pair of them _seemed_ to be safe from their pursuers who had not yet thought to break the windows in.

Not that Craig was complaining.

“I hope you know this is literally the worst night of my life.”

He cast a glance outside, to the yard illuminated by his trailer lights, and the telescope parts and posters scattered in the mud outside.

“And it’s your fault.”

“ _My fault_?! _”_ Tweek’s voice rose in pitch, and in the lamplight his eyes looked like full moons, shining and reflective and extra-terrestrial. “If it hadn’t been for you, I would have gone to the compound when I was supposed to and none of this would have happened!”

He sounded pretty sour for someone who had successfully seduced Craig into agreeing a cross-country road trip to God knows where.

“Yeah? So why don’t you go out there _now_ then? Make it stop so I can go back to my life.”

Scowling, Craig leant against the bench opposite Tweek, and crossed his arms over his chest for maximum glaring effect. He didn’t really _mean_ it. The shocking situation in which they found themselves made him think a whole slew of horrible things he didn’t really believe, and frankly it was lucky that amongst all the comments that could have potentially come out of his mouth right now, this was relatively inoffensive. Nevertheless, Tweek seemed aghast at such a suggestion.

“No!” He was trying exceptionally hard to keep his voice down – no small challenge when he was shivering with wetness and fear. “They will _kill_ me! You know they will _literally_ kill me, right?!”

Craig scoffed, even though it was becoming harder and harder to believe that this frazzled disaster of a man could never be of significant enough purpose to warrant being murdered.

“Oh come on. It doesn't work like that! Do you really think you're so important that if the congregation of cult idiots get their hands on your cold dead body, will it postpone the end of the world?”

Unlikely.

Tweek’s cheeks darkened, his mouth opening and closing as though he couldn’t pull satisfactory words from the air.

“Maybe I am!” he finally managed. “Maybe, for a little while, I really believed I was! What’s wrong with that, anyway? Doesn’t _everyone_ want to think that their life and the choices they make matter?”

“No! Fuck no! Who would want the fate of the _entire universe_ on their back? Don’t get me wrong, I like you a lot, but you seem like the kind of person who couldn’t even handle the responsibility of his own laundry.”

Tweek’s nostrils flared. All movement of his body stilled, and his lips pressed thin and bloodless against one another.

“Craig, when I agreed to this whole thing I literally wanted to die.”

The coolness of his tone made Craig’s skin crawl. Partway in envy, partway in shame. He had never been able to say such a thing before out loud himself, but now he had heard it he wasn't sure he liked it. Now the idea was right there in front of him, he was realising that the feeling was raw and throbbing and sickening like an open wound. An ugly reflection of himself in an unfamiliar, shadowy face.

Craig felt no affinity for this feeling, in those moments. He felt no sympathy, and no weakness to the idea. Instead, he felt a deep aversion, and he realised that he didn’t want to die right now. He didn’t want to die ever. He had simply longed and longed for years that someday, he would only cease to be alive. Or at least, that someday he would be delivered into a deep and dreamless sleep.

A bone-deep exhaustion stole over him, reaching the very tips of all his fingers and toes. The rain kept falling, a steady pattering sound on the rooftop, and the pipes under the sink groaned as if they couldn’t handle the shift in temperature much longer. Craig had to close his eyes a moment, the smell of the storm filling his nose and lungs like he was drowning, and even though it was cold the tingle of a breaking sweat sprung up on his shoulders and upper lip. The walls seemed to move in closer, blocking out everything except the throb of his pulse, but simultaneously the four of them seemed to blow apart, propelled to different corners of an infinite universe never to converge again.

The sensation was painful and somewhere vague ideas of medications and breathing and a thousand other stupid sounding things eluded him. His arms unfolded, and instinctively he took a white knuckled grip on the countertop behind him. Far away, he thought he could hear a noise. A soft chatter and the sound of something metal banging on wood. It didn’t seem real, though, until Tweek gasped and the moment was broken. Numb and vacant, Craig was being grabbed by the wrist and pulled downwards, out of the line of sight of the window. His head was spinning

What the hell was happening?

He dragged himself back to the present, and the cold terracotta tiles under his knees. Tweek was saying something in a frenzied whisper, but his words were garbled and nonsensical. Or maybe they weren't and Craig was just trying to make sense of them, without the visual guidance of watching them come from his mouth.

" _What?!_ "

" _I said, there's someone outside! Jesus Christ..."_

Down in the shadows, all of his features began to blur together and morph silently, eddying like ink dropped in water and dissolving in the dark.

_"What? What are they doing?"_

_"I don't know!"_

Tweek raised himself up a little, face moving into a weak pool of light cast by the oil lamp, and made his best effort to peer outside.

"Oh God, I think they are trying the door again," he reported. "Listen..."

Craig listened, and the faint sound of a doorknob rattling became audible under the sound of the rain.

"Why can’t they just leave us alone?!"  Craig whined, feeling some important strut of his composure cracking under the stress of the situation he found himself in. He remembered that if all this shit hadn't happened, he could totally be in bed right now sleeping, his body prone under the fading glowing stars painted on his ceiling. Having had this privilege snatched away, what else did he have left?

A sleepless night on a cold kitchen floor, his body aching and his heart hammering in his throat at the threat of the unknown. Was this strange passery worth that? Was _anything_?

"Why won't you assholes just leave us alone?!"

He stood up, and Tweek hissed, trying to grab his leg and pull him backwards. Craig kicked him off, and started toward the door.

"Did you hear that?!" He was screaming now, left fist coming down on the wood and shooting an arrow of pain through his knuckles. "We didn't do _shit_ to you! Fuck _off! Leave me alone!"_

He was jerked backwards just in time.

The arm which seized him around the waist pulled him out of the trajectory of a large spray of splinters from the doorframe, the loud bang of something colliding with the wooden door from the outside deafened him for a moment and the following shout from right next to his ear sounded ringing and violent. Tweek threw him against the table, his hip cracking against the wood and making him double over in pain. The kitchen door quaked in its frame as again, something impacted the back of it, sending a huge crack shooting across the inside like fork lightening. Before Craig could even straighten himself he was being manhandled again, Tweek heaving him off the table and pushing him around the other side, toward the access to the rear of the bar.

" _Run!_ "

Craig ran. He ran faster than anyone would ever have thought possible with a feverish, agonising throb coursing through his upper thigh. The pain made him see bluish bruises blooming before his eyes, and if it wasn't for the hand at his back pushing him he might not have been able to make it around the side of the bar. Far away, as though he was hearing it through snowfall on a radio transmission, Craig heard the sound of the door giving way, and the clang of something like a metal petrol can being thrown onto the kitchen floor. Craig rocketed around tables and chairs, guided only by the muscle memory of the space. Where to put his feet was the last thing on his mind. In fact, his mind had suddenly became a very still, very quiet place. As though he had just been dropped in a large vat of something, thicker than water and very, very cold. Even in the dim everything seemed too real to be real, the details of the door he was approaching leapt out at him as though he had never noticed them before. Maybe he hadn't. worn rug under his bare feet felt gritty with sand, like it needed a vacuum, and over the whoosh of gasoline igniting (Craig had always thought that sound was a myth from the movies) he could hear Tweek's laboured breathing, the shallow tense way he sucked in air like he was going to pass out at any second.

The door was locked. He threw his bodyweight against it and it didn't yield, even a little. Tweek choked back a furious scream, and pushed in front of him.

"You're fucking KIDDING me!"

He rattled the knob frantically, got on his toes and tried groping for a spare key on the top of the fame. Craig watched numbly from behind while Tweek panicked, his legs like soft noodles and his whole right side throbbing like a tide moving up the beach shore. He was feeling a little light headed.

Tweek pulled at his hair in frustration, his whole body quivering like he was a high tension wire. The knowledge that Kenny kept a spare door key in the vase beside the staircase was lost to them both, as was the faculty of logic. The conservatory, with all its windows of easily breakable glass, was just on the other side of the door to the left, but behind them were hurried footsteps and the sloshing of more petrol spilling on carpet.

Tweek _screamed_ , and with strength Craig would never have expected from someone with such a conservative posture, he aimed a kick at the spot below the door handle, shattering the jamb and sending the door mechanism outwards onto the deck.

The door gave way to them, Tweek dragging Craig through the arch and into the mercy of the night beyond.

The rain was still falling, and there was mud underfoot, and behind them the pub was going up in flames like a star that had fallen; impossible to comprehend, and burning.

 

...

 

It was hard to make out anything in the backlight of the fire, and the smoke which spilled heavy and thick from the door. Across the road, the endless dessert was swallowed by the night, and on the edges of Craig's vision he could see shadows moving, like human shapes closing in and blocking off escape. Tweek didn't hesitate, pulling Craig straight forward into the dark and toward the high fence which separated the side of the hotel from the petrol station and workshop. They passed a car on the way, a small vehicle that might have been Wendy Testaburger's Corolla. The vehicle looked like it had been attacked and broken into, the windows shattered and winking in the flickering orange of the flames they were leaving in their wake. Where was the driver?d they been dragged through the mud and sent running into the desert?  Had they been murdered or beaten or punished for trying to escape? Over the rain, Craig could hear voices. Non-distinct voices calling to each other, co-ordinating their movements, and pursuing the pair of them as they passed the deserted vehicle, and Craig tried to accept that he knew that car - it was _Wendy's_ car - would never be parked outside the peaceful and pretty town museum again.

It seemed like a dream. The whole situation had that abject, hollow terror of a bad dream about it. But Craig's sense of awareness was too acute for it to be anything but reality. 

'Tweek," He tried to call to the man in front of him, pulling him through the chaos towards god knew what. His voice came out a lot feebler than he would have liked. "Tweek, that's Wendy's car."

He wasn't sure why this was important. Or why he even remembered such a stupid detail at a time like this. All he knew was that it _was_ important, and he needed this person, the only other person he could tell, to acknowledge it. It was vital that he understand that Wendy's car was empty, the body beaten and crumpled and unable to be repaired, and that for some reason this made Craig feel sick. He couldn't rationalise the shock of it. Where was Wendy? Where was Kyle? Where was _anybody_?

Were they alone here now?e last people in the entire town?

Tweek sniffed and pulled him closer, run slowing to a swift walk as they rounded the fence separating the hotel from the garage next door. Without warning, Craig found himself being hitched up onto Tweek's shoulder. Craig yelped as his world was inverted, all the blood rushing to his head.

"What are you doing?!"s throat was sore from raising his voice, and suddenly upside down the world seemed even more nauseanducing. hoped he wouldn't puke down the back of Tweek's sodden shirt.

"You're limping." Tweek panted, "You are _not_ about to collapse on me. I won't wait for you to get back up again if you do."

"I'm not limping!"

Aie. Craig was starting to become _really_ aware of the pain in his upper leg now. He tried to push himself up, and felt a wave of vertigo pass through him. Rain ran down the back of his neck and into his hair. Tweek's movement was hurting him - every step made him gag on the pain.

"I'm going to puke," heard himself saying, his fingers clawing on the back waistband of Tweek's pants. He wasn't sure if Tweek was listening.

The sudden jolt that came from being dumped into the passenger seat of a tall vehicle made him retch, and before he could help himself the remains of his microwave meal was being brought up, dribbling onto the floor of the Isuzu he had been dropped into. His eyes were watering, the back of his nose burning with acid, and he could feel himself flushing hot with embarrassment and misery. Tweek didn't bat an eyelid. He leaned over, dripping hair and clothes and still shaking, and belted Craig firmly into the spare seat.

"Don't move," he said, stepping back and going to shut the door. For some reason, this made Craig's chest clench. He grabbed the passenger handle and stopped him, forgetting to scrub his mouth with the back of his hand and not stopping to think about the pain this motion would cause him.

"Where are you going?"

His voice sounded raspy, not like his own. Tweek hit his hand away and forced the door closed.

" _Don't move!_ " He insisted, and Craig watched him through blurring, shifting eyes as he ran around the front of the car and to the driver side. The light from the burning pub was throwing long shadows into the garage yard. The vehicles still parked by the shed, the store with its darkened windows shining. The gas pumps seemed abandoned, ghostly and sinister, and when Craig closed his eyes he remembered standing next to them a few days ago, jamming the fuel pump into the hatch of a tall blonde stranger’s car.

He didn't even jump when the driver side door opened, and Tweek spluttered a handful of expletives, attempting to heave something heavy and misshapen from its current position occupying the driver’s side into the back.

"Craig! Don't just sit there! Help me!"

And far away, Craig heard someone yelling something. Something that sounded like

" _Right here! Here they are! I found them!_ "

Who were they running from again?

He turned his head, trying to make out whatever it was that was giving Tweek so much trouble. It looked vaguely familiar in shape, slumped over the steering wheel like it was resting there, and it wasn't until he leaned closer and tried to help push it upright that Craig realised what it was. Or who it was.

"Kenny?"

He looked to Tweek, trying to find an answer and not succeeding.e window on the driver’s side had been smashed like the windows on Wendy's corolla, and the steering wheel was sticky and covered in strands of light hair. The keys jangled in the ignition when Tweek knocked them, and the keyring that said KISS glinted, reflecting the hazy orange light that was starting to flicker over the edges of the wooden fence.

"What the fuck Kenny! This isn't fucking funny!"

Craig snapped his seatbelt off as Tweek finally succeeded in showing the other man over the back seat of the car, and made to lunge over the headrest to catch him as he fell to the ground with a thud. He heard Tweek screaming something at him, something upset and furious that matched the way he grabbed at Craig's pyjama pants and tried to pull him back down into sitting position. His hands found little purchase, but Craig couldn't fit over the back seat - instead he hung there like he had hung over Tweek's shoulder only a minute ago, trying to pull Kenny upwards by his t-shirt. He hardly noticed Tweek cursing, the vehicle shuddering as something heavy collided with the back.

This couldn't be real. No _way_ could this be real. Of all the people in the world, of everyone Craig had ever met he couldn't imagine Kenny being the one lying rigid and unseeing on the Isuzu floor. Across the space between himself and Tweek, he heard a horrible wrenching sob, and underneath him the car shuddered to life.

Above his head, the back window shattered, and shards of glass rained down on him in a cascade of points and water.

_"You can’t get away from us!"_

The voice belonged to a woman, a hysteric fever overflowing and making Craig's ears hurt. Again, the vehicle shuddered, people slamming against it and trying to grope inside.

 _"Don't you_ DARE _try and escape from us!"_

"You try and fucking _stop_ me!"

Tweek was crying, or maybe he was laughing, as he smashed the gears on the car into reverse and slammed his foot down. For an awful moment, the clutch dropped and there was no traction, but then he must have done something unbelievably improper and dangerous because the gearbox started howling like a demon, sending the vehicle shooting backwards and thumping over the heavy meaty body of the woman trying to climb in the rear. Craig was winded, flung back over the seat against the dashboard, and the edges of his vision started blurring and guttering like a candle flame starting to drown in its own wax. He was struggling to breathe from the pain, the hot agony in his leg and the crushing punctured feeling in his chest. He was going to die tonight, he knew it. He was only twentyeven, and he was going to die. The finale was coming, and soon he would be as dead as everyone else in the town probably was. He would soon be as dead as Kenny was. Kenny, who used to drink beer at ten am, and wash glasses with cold water, and wink at pretty tourist girls even if they had boyfriends or husbands hanging onto them. If Kenny could die, at the hands of madmen, then _anyone_ could die at any time and so what? Did it matter if they did?

Craig couldn't know. He couldn't know and he couldn't make sense of anything.

He slumped over the dashboard, relinquishing his consciousness to darkness and to rest, sinking into the blissful, silent emptiness of the end.

 

 _And there was evening_ ,  _and there was morning_ \- the fifth day.


	8. EPILOGUE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art for this chapter is by Xiao and can be found [here](http://spbigbang.org/art-galleries/spbb2016gallery?thumb_limitstart=40#!spbb2016_art_by_xiao01_02)

_And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea. (REV 21:1)_

 

When he woke, he wished he hadn't.   
  
Consciousness ebbed through him slowly, like a sunrise bleeding into the desert and completely in sync with the purplish light beginning to burn along the horizon. Craig surfaced a little, became aware of a terrible, rancid ache in his leg, only to sink back down again and struggle to stay there. The stiffness in his neck was making it difficult, and the juddering of the vehicle engine below roused him every time he inched too close toward oblivion. Soon enough, he found himself stirring, eyes blinking open and sweeping over the dashboard, crusted with dried blood, and the windshield which had a crack like a spider web across it. The fissures sparkled like jewellery in the spreading dawn. He tried to sit up, only to be rendered breathless by the pain, and the warm fabric thing spread over him slid y off his shoulders into his lap.   
  
Tweak’s jacket. The hoodie he had taken up to Brass Ridge. He must have left it in the car yesterday.  
Yesterday... something had happened yesterday. Or no. Something had happened _today_. Craig had slept between now and then, his memory slowly returning as he looked around and took in the damage that whatever it was had caused.   
  
"Good morning." Tweek sounded exhausted, and he probably was. His knuckled looked white and bloodless on the wheel, his shoulders rigid like he was made of stone. The wind through the broken side window sent his hair whipping loosely around his face, and in the silver blue glow of the morning he looked so pale he was ghostly, an apparition from across a universal plane. Craig's skin prickled, and he realised he was cold.   
  
"Hi..." he trailed off, glancing at the speedometer and the clock on the dashboard. The time was after nine am. "Is the clock broken or something?"  
  
Tweek's jaw tensed and he shook his head.  
  
"Nope. Not what I can tell. We’ve driven almost 400 miles according to the speedometer. So five hours."   
  
"We should be out of the Basin by now." Craig told him, as though he hadn't already figured that out.  
  
"Sun should be up too." Tweek said, his grip on the wheel growing tighter. "But it isn't. Just that glow on the horizon."

Craig winced and forced himself into a sitting position.

"It’s  nothing. There have been some weird weather patterns recently," he assured him feebly. "Is the GPS working?"

Tweek shook his head, and Craig saw that he was shaking again, so close to breaking into shivers. He turned his face away, looking to the sky where the light blended into the fading night, and studied the stars on the cusp of that moment where they disappear into the light of day. The moon was still visible, far to the east, and Craig realised it had stopped raining. The water from above had fallen to the earth, swallowed by the thirsty sand and sent down deep into the aquifer beneath the Basin floor.

"If you keep driving, we will reach the rim soon."

It was strange that he could still say that, even though he didn't really believe it.

They drove until the Isuzu ran out of gas.

They ran out of gas at what the clock said was eleven twenty nine am, but might have been just before daylight started breaking. The stars were still out, faded and ethereal, and the moon hung in place like it had been frozen in time, an unearthly vision difficult to rationalise, and harder to ignore. The gradual slowing of the vehicle made Craig's stomach turn. He tried to brace himself to prevent the final jerk upsetting his leg, but to no avail. Even the tiniest nudge of motion ending made him feel light headed in pain.

"I think my leg is broken," he said, "I think..."

He tried to remember where he had hurt himself. Had it been before or after they left the hotel?

"I pushed you into the table," Tweek told him, "I didn't realise until we were outside. I didn't mean to."

Craig blinked at him, piecing the fragments of his memory back together. Was that what happened? He thought it was. He recalled the smell of gasoline and the sound of an unseen aggressor breaking in the rear kitchen door. If Tweek hadn't pushed him out of the way, he would have taken a whole lot of shattered door to the face, and he thought he could be slightly grateful for that, if nothing else.

God, had that all really happened? It seemed so far away.

Now they were still again, Craig took a moment to close his eyes. He could feel himself starting to get thirsty, his head throbbing with the dull, tired soreness of dehydration. Were there still bottles of water in the back? Kenny always used to keep bottles of water in the back.

When Craig thought of Kenny, his heart seemed to stop and his eyes snapped open, wide and staring into the distance. Tweek was still sitting with his hands on the wheel, hair hiding his face and the expressions passing over it.

"Is Kenny still back there?" He asked, the dread audible and heavy on the air between them.

Tweek nodded.

And everything suddenly came upon him all at once, an unrelenting replay of his life, his home, and everything that had slipped from his grasp like sand pouring in between his fingers. The understanding was so heavy, denser than the atmosphere of a billion planets all layered into one, and it seeped through his along his nerves and into his bones in a way that made him shake with awe and grief for what he had lost.

Kenny was gone. His _home_ was gone. Everyone who knew him, the people who had smiled at him, and learned his name, were gone and he could never go back. And as he pulled together the threads of this logic, it became clear that had Tweek stayed away, had this boy just gone like he had meant to and left Craig alone, he would have stayed safe and happy in his caravan, watching old animated shows and fixing dusty old engines until the moment he died, and he would never have known loss again. He would have been safe and no one would have noticed him, disappearing into the forgotten valleys of history. He wished he could go back to that. Go back to _wanting_ that.

Because that was the worst part. That deep down somewhere, he didn't want to.

He wanted gardens and cities, and drizzle on a Friday afternoon. He wanted fresh coffees, and walks along the river, and the sound of traffic filling his ears so that he could forget the Radiant Basin, and Kenny, and everything inside him that had kept him there so long without second thinking. He regretted his choices, and he regretted his birth, and most of all he regretted letting himself be reminded of life outside. Of winter and laughing at small dogs on leashes, and smiling politely at strangers he passed on the streets.

What was he going to do with himself now? Now he didn't have a home? He couldn't go back, but he couldn't go anywhere else either. Not now he had lost his roots, and the only stable thing he had in a careless and chaotic universe. His parents, his childhood home, seemed like the place of a stranger, and there was no way to imagine a life now, after this. How could there be anything after this? Alone in the desert with a vehicle and a corpse, and a boy who had taken everything he had away from him without a second thought.

Rage moved through him, and it was a relief, because unlike grief rage prompted action, and action meant that maybe, sometime in the distant future, there might be change.

He jerked the door release handle, and steeling himself against the blinding pain as he moved he slid out and landed on his good leg outside, pressing the chair shift leaver so he could reach through and drag Kenny's body through the gap toward him with his bandaged hand.

"What are you doing?!" Tweek sounded anxious, but Craig didn't care. Let him be anxious all he wanted, there was no way for him to understand the real depth of what he had brought upon them. The awful, evil things that his choices had inflicted upon others.

Fuck him. Fuck him and everything about him. Craig felt repulsive, for having warmed to him. He felt betrayed, for having been taken in. Tweek was the devil, the bringer of the end. Craig wished he had thrown him to the Disciples when he had the chance.

Kenny's body fell onto the dirt with a loud thump, and gasping every time he moved Craig hobbled around to the back of the trailer to avoid looking at him. He looked so _small_ without his life in him. So slight and fragile like a broken twig. His hair was clotted with blood and sand, one side of his face crushed concave against the wheel Tweek was sat behind. Craig felt himself gag as he thought of it, but he swallowed it back down again in order to open the hatch and pull out the shovel.

"Craig, what are you doing?!"

He heard Tweek get out of the car, but he was already on his way around the side, back to where Kenny's corpse lay in the dust. The shovel made it easier to walk without putting pressure on his sore leg, and it was a lifesaver when it came to dragging Kenny's body across the dirt further off the compacted road. When Tweek reached him, he was making ready to start digging, balanced on one leg and driving the shovel with great difficulty into the earth.

"Craig stop it!"

Craig didn't stop it. He almost lost his balance, and he was light headed from the pain, but Craig Tucker was going to dig a grave for his past life if it goddamned _killed_ him.

"Craig! Stop!"

 Tweek grabbed the shovel, jerking it out of his grip and throwing it a decent six feet away. Furious, Craig tried to scramble after it, but his leg made it difficult to even move a step and Tweek was seizing him before he could make it even a quarter of the way. A small struggle ensued, but as Craig had thought on that very first day, it was absolutely no match between them. Weak and trembling with pain, he gave in instantly, barely managing to hammer a feeble punch against Tweek’s chest.

"You did this!" He told him, voice choked by the emotion he couldn't convey. "You did this to me! I was _happy_ , before you came and ruined everything!"

He glared at him, his clammy, sweaty face, and his eyes greener than the greenest thing Craig would ever remember seeing in his life. His paleness like alabaster in the cold light was unearthly, and he seemed more like a stranger now than he ever had been. This life ruiner, this angel of death. Craig didn't even know his real name.

"... Who are you?" he asked finally. And for a moment, Tweek looked as though he might reply.

"I-"

He cut himself off, spotting something over Craig's shoulder that captured his attention. With much difficulty, Craig craned his neck to see where he was looking at.

Far overhead, above the blurry fracture where the heavens met the earth, streaks of silver light like rain moved silently across the sky towards the ground. The stars which had shone for a million years started moving, the gravity that held them in place began breaking, and even though Craig was seeing he couldn't understand because that was impossible. Worse than impossible. Unthinkable. Overwhelmed by the shear incomprehensibility of it all, he felt himself start crying, and his fists resting on Tweek's chest became claws, pulling at his shirt and trying to move closer against him.

"I'm scared," he told him honestly. "I'm so afraid, I don't know how to die. I've never had to do it before."

"You aren't going to die." Tweek pulled him close against his chest, and for a moment, the world became the small gap between them. Craig could see nothing but the light edging between their bodies, and smell nothing but the drying rain over his sweat. Right now, he could be anywhere, anywhere but here, and wrapped in his arms it felt like Craig was in the last safe space in the entire world. The only refuge in the middle of a storm. He felt breath against his ear, and hands braced against his shoulders and back, and soon the light bleeding between them became blinding, as though the sun was finally rising and a new day had finally begun, but soon, the light became even more blinding than that - Craig couldn't bring himself to look at it.

"You won't die." Tweek repeated to him softly, his voice echoing like it was passed across an impossible distance, just for him "I promise."

And maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would. Maybe if he did, it wouldn't mean anything. Life was life, and death was death, and if this was going to be his final resting place then that was that. He was no-one great or special, and he certainly was in no position to challenge the will of a God.

If this was the end, then this was the end. His bones would lie against Tweek’s for all eternity, his dead eyes fixed unseeing on the endless, starless void of the sky.

 

The End.

**Author's Note:**

> Its been over a year since i wrote this story, and tbh there are so many small details which bother me that i considered re-working it a little before i posted it. i decided to refrain in the end. perhaps, if i wrote it again i would do some stuff differently? but overall i am still impressed i was able to complete this whole project to a readable standard.
> 
> Now if only i could complete all those wips...
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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